Memory is Cyclical in Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s “Radiant Remembrance"

Throughout the third floor galleries of the New Museum, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s solo exhibition, “Radiant Remembrance” (on view from June 29 to September 17, 2023) delves into war memories obscured by colonial space, time, and epistemology. A multimedia installation of sculptural, archival, photographic, and filmic elements, the exhibit examines the sonic, visual, and affective dimensions of rememory. As developed by writer Toni Morrison in Beloved, “rememory” describes the recollection of repressed or forgotten pasts, entailing processes of not only excavation, but also—as Nguyen demonstrates––enjambment. “Radiant Remembrance” highlights the continuation of lives, histories, and materialities beyond spatial and temporal punctuations to suggest, and imagine, their more capacious contexts and possibilities.

In the staircase leading down to the third floor of the museum hang three of Nguyen’s brass mobiles: Firebird, Rolling Thunder, and Starlite (all 2023). Named after an attack helicopter (Firebird) and aerial bombing operations (Rolling Thunder and Starlite) during the so-called Vietnam War, the mobiles are made of 57mm artillery shells, each tuned to a different frequency. At the foot of the staircase, a large M117 bomb dropped from a U.S. B-52 plane has been fastened to wooden beams reminiscent of Vietnamese pagodas, composing Unexploded Resonance (2022). As a bell tuned to 432hz—a frequency believed to potentially heal trauma—Unexploded Resonance, like the other mobiles, has been endowed with new life by Nguyen, who has repurposed war projectiles and munitions into works of art and instruments of repair. In suspension, they remain untouchable and unsoundable in the museum, vibrant objects brimming with dormant potentiality.

These works feature in Nguyen’s 58-minute film, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022), playing in the adjoining room. Set in the present-day former demilitarized zone of Quảng Trị, the film features a young woman, Nguyệt, who is both a scrap collector and artist grappling with the inheritances of her bombed surroundings (as the museum label informs us, “80 percent of Quảng Trị is still contaminated by undetonated mines and explosives”). According to the film, objects are not dead; they can be reincarnated or brought back to life. The ways in which remnants from the film have made their way into the exhibit– such as the Calder-esque mobiles and the bomb-turned-bell—attest to an intertextuality between Nguyen’s media that challenge the prescribed boundedness of art objects and histories. In the film, Nguyệt transforms artillery shells into a brass arm for her cousin Lai, who had been maimed by unexploded ordnance. The prosthetic reappears in Nguyen’s sculpture, Shattered Arms (2022), as an appendage for a wooden statue of the deity Quan Yin that was found amputated.