Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Radiant Remembrance
New Museum, New York

It is hard to think of a more optimistic artist working today than Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Odd, given that his subject matter is the intergenerational trauma provoked by the long legacies of colonial war in his home country of Vietnam. His latest solo exhibition, “Radiant Remembrance,” at the New Museum in New York, transmuted pain through elements of the sublime, and the presentation of sculptures, video installations, and still photographs coalesced in a reflection on the legacy of violence across multiple countries. Under Nguyen’s spell, dark material shimmered.

The first exhibition space juxtaposed a large Alexander Calder-esque mobile sculpture, A Rising Moon Through the Smoke (2022), with a 60-minute video titled The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). The film follows the story of Nguyệt, a young Vietnamese woman who scavenges trash to support her grief-stricken mother. Much of the detritus—shrapnel and large undetonated bombs—are remnants from the American war in Vietnam that ravaged the country half a century ago. We learn that a bomb was responsible for the death of the protagonist’s father and brother. Similar unexploded ordnance caused serious injury to Nguyệt’s cousin, who lost both legs, an arm, and an eye after tampering with an undetonated explosive. To her mother’s horror, Nguyệt attends to bombs and shrapnel with love and care, arranging pieces in the garden like sentinels of minimalist tranquility.