Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance

Nguyen’s New Museum presentation will be his first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., showcasing a new film and two recent video projects alongside works from the artist’s broader practice.

Developing projects through collaborative community engagement and extensive archival research, Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976, Saigon, Vietnam) utilizes strategies of remembrance to highlight unofficial and suppressed histories. Interweaving the factual and the speculative and often employing mythologies of otherworldly realms, Nguyen’s films re-work dominant narratives into stories that propose creative forms of healing the intergenerational traumas of colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his interest in animism and material memory, the affective and historical charge embedded into objects, Nguyen’s installations and sculptural practice coincide with and expand on the themes explored in his films.

Installed in the New Museum’s Third Floor galleries, “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance” is the artist’s first major U.S. solo museum exhibition, showcasing a new film, Because No One Living Will Listen (2023), and two recent video projects, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), alongside works from the artist’s broader practice. Drawing together conceptual threads from across the Global South via the interconnected histories of Vietnam, Senegal, Morocco, France, and the United States, “Radiant Remembrance” sparks a dialogue on inherited memory and testimony as forms of resistance and empowerment.

“Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance” is curated by Vivian Crockett, Curator, with Ian Wallace, Curatorial Assistant, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by the New Museum. The catalogue includes a conversation between the artist and Vivian Crockett and texts by Zoe Butt, Eungie Joo, Catherine Quan Damman, and Christopher Myers.