Please join us for the 2024 Lijin Lecture, featuring Tuan Andrew Nguyen and a screening of his film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). The program will begin with a short artist talk, followed by the screening and Q&A with the artist and curator Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander.

For multiple generations, the residents of Quảng Trị on the North Central Coast of Vietnam have lived with the physical residue and lingering trauma of war, in one of the most heavily bombed areas in the history of modern warfare. The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon explores the ways in which material contains memory and holds potential for transformation, reincarnation, and healing.

The film centers around a woman named Nguyệt, who is the lone caretaker for her mother and their scrapyard business. The labor is backbreaking and tedious but she manages to do it alone. As a reprieve from her life, Nguyệt makes beautiful hanging sculptures from bomb scraps that look almost exactly like Alexander Calder’s work. Nguyệt soon realizes that she’s the reincarnation of Calder—famous for his kinetic sculptures and very outspoken against the war in Vietnam. But what would it mean that she’s now making those sculptures, using bomb material in Vietnam?

Two other works by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, sculptures made with brass from artillery shells, can be seen in the exhibition Spirit House, on view at the Cantor Arts Center from September 4, 2024 through January 26, 2025.

We gratefully acknowledge support from The Distinguished Lecture in Asian Art Fund in Honor of the Lijin Collection.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work explores the power of storytelling through video and sculpture. His projects are based on extensive research and community engagement, tapping into inherited histories and counter-memory. Nguyen extracts and re-works dominant, oftentimes colonial histories and supernaturalisms into imaginative vignettes. Fact and fiction are interwoven in poetic narratives that span time and place.

Nguyen was born in 1976 in Ho Chi Minh City. In 1979, he and his family emigrated as refugees to the United States. Nguyen graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received his Masters of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, where he is a co-founder and former board member of Sàn Art. Nguyen was a founding member of The Propeller Group in 2006, an entity that positions itself between a fake advertising company and an art collective. Accolades for the group include the main prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and a Creative Capital award among others.