Over spring break, I worked as a gallery assistant for Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Bushwick, where I installed “A SILENCE SO LOUD.” The exhibition centered on a video piece by Tuan Andrew Nguyen titled Because No One Living Will Listen, documenting the story of Moroccan defectors after the Vietnam War and the remnants of their fragmented legacies in Vietnam. The film traces the lives of Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army, only to have their repatriation hindered by the start of the Vietnam War. Through a two-channel video, I was introduced to the speculative beauty of Nguyen’s work—following Habiba, a criminalized woman of Moroccan descent who spends her time picking up trash off the streets of Vietnam while narrating her failed pilgrimage to Morocco. Seeking to understand her lineage, she confronts the language barriers that mark her as a diasporic outsider to her motherland.
As Habiba explores the violence embedded in her bloodline through a letter to her deceased father, Nguyen weaves in elements of speculative fiction— arabesque gates, portals, and the unfolding of the universe itself. The ending is not redemptive: our narrator does not return to her ancestral home. Instead, she sobs over her uncertain future in Vietnam, and the arabesque gates, once her symbolic tether to Morocco, burn down, leaving her severed from her ancestral past.
It was here that I was introduced to the deeply moving and nuanced work of Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Born in 1976 in Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen emigrated with his family to the United States as a refugee. His practice centers on the Vietnam War and the different communities shaped by its aftermath—from those directly impacted by violence, pollution, fatalities, and loss to those indirectly isolated or displaced after being exploited for wartime efforts. I found myself drawing parallels from Nguyen’s lineage to my own: my father’s side, similarly, also moved to America after the Vietnam War, and I still reckon with the same issues today. Perhaps this was also why I was drawn to the pieces themselves; I saw a fragment of myself inside Nguyen’s works that covered a history I desperately wanted to examine myself.
During the week of my internship, I explored Chinatown much, much more than I had been able to before; since I was living in Chelsea, the familiar Chinese cuisines I grew up with were only a fifteen-minute walk away. On one of my walks, I stumbled upon a restaurant next to an art gallery that coincidentally was also having a solo exhibition of Nguyen’s works titled Lullaby of Cannons for the Night. Here, I was introduced to the sculptural side of Nguyen’s practice. In a Calder-esque fashion, he crafted mobiles from bomb fragments, salvaged in the Quảng Trị region of central Vietnam, as unexploded leftovers from the Vietnam War. Paired with his video work—following the perspective of unexploded ordnance eventually detonating and destroying a rainforest in Vietnam—the exhibition makes full use of gallery space, culminating in a larger narrative about postwar bombs left over in Vietnam and the socio-environmental destructions they cause even today.
Something unique that Nguyen pursued in his creation of these mobiles was the tuning of bells used to create a sonic response for the viewer. One of the pieces, Dragon Tail, features stainless steel with bomb metal and brass from not only a pounded artillery shell, but also a bell, which curators describe as “tuned to A3, 432 Hz.” Nguyen worked on sculpting around sound, working with a sound healer to tune each work as he juxtaposed the bomb fragments’ harmful natures with the healing tunes. Furthermore, the mobility of these objects works with the space around them, creating new sound waves as the audience walks around or interacts with the artwork up close.
The spatial relationships demand attention: as they oscillate and reverberate, they question how history echoes into the present. In an interview with Frieze, Nguyen also poses this exact question: “If they could speak, I wonder how [the mobiles] would feel about transitioning from an unwilling mercenary of war to a sleek object of contemporary art, tinkling gently with the opening and closing of gallery doors.”
The sculptural and film pieces come together in The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, also Nguyen’s best-known work. A single-channel video installation exhibited alongside sculptural objects crafted from fragments of unexploded bombs. Coincidentally, Unburied Sounds is set in the region of Quảng Trị, where Nguyen sources his metals for sculptures, as it was the most bombarded region during the Vietnam War. The film focuses on a mother-daughter duo of Nguyet and her mother, who runs a small junkyard on the outskirts of the province. As the story progresses, protagonist Nguyet eventually realizes she is the reincarnation of Alexander Calder, which is the force compelling her to create similar mobile sculptures. Yet, the film also questions the idea of authorship: Why would a famous white man “artist” reincarnate into a poor trash collector? What does it mean now that Nguyet is making those sculptures using bomb materials?
As Nguyen notes in an interview, “I am infatuated with…the thought that objects can hold…karma.” His work wrestles not only the karmic weight stored within objects but also with the spiritual afterlives of people themselves. Unburied Sounds and other works exemplify this question, complicating mobiles as vessels of reincarnations of individuals, but also collectively asserting the hauntings of histories in every piece. Ultimately, Nguyen’s sculptures and sound pieces create a haunting harmony of the war and its nuanced legacies, transforming once brutal tools into new healing pathways.
