Making Art Out of Bombshells and Memories in Vietnam

Not quite 20 minutes into “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon,” a film by the artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, the camera settles on a distinctive-looking monument at the far end of a wooden footbridge. We’re in Quang Tri province, central Vietnam. The bridge spans the Ben Hai River, which for 21 years, from the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to the fall of Saigon in 1975, was the demarcation line between North and South Vietnam. A couple of miles in either direction was the so-called Demilitarized Zone, a “buffer” that became one of the most-bombed places on the planet.

This reconstructed footbridge was the tenuous link that connected warring halves of the divided country. The postwar monument at its southern end is called Desire for National Reunification, but the tragic reality of this place is that it is so littered with unexploded shells that anyone who ventures beyond a few well-worn paths risks being blown apart. Memories fade but the trauma survives, not just in peoples’ minds but in the land they inhabit.

“Unburied Sounds” is the centerpiece of “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance,” set to open at the New Museum in Manhattan on June 29 — less than a month after he was awarded the 2023 Joan Miro Prize in Barcelona. It will be his first major solo museum exhibition in the United States. The last time he was in a leading American art institution, six years ago, was with the Propeller Group, the Ho Chi Minh City-based collective that captured the art world’s attention even as the trio was on the verge of splintering.

The Propeller Group was known for the sly and artful commentary of such projects as “Television Commercial for Communism,” a mock rebranding campaign that presented the New Communism as a slightly daffy lifestyle choice characterized by loosefitting clothes, sappy folk music and smile after friendly smile. Nguyen’s current work is more personal, more subtle and more ambitious. His videos, which along with artifacts he created for them, will fill the third-floor galleries of the New Museum, exploring questions of memory and identity with an urgency that only someone caught between two cultures — someone whose given names are “Tuan” and “Andrew,” for example — could muster.

“Since the Propeller Group, a lot of my work has been about memory,” the 47-year-old artist said in a video interview from his studio in Ho Chi Minh City. “And how memory functions to help us deal with trauma. Intergenerational trauma.”

Nguyen was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, the son of a former South Vietnamese draftee. He was 2 years old when his parents escaped Vietnam as “boat people.” He grew up in Oklahoma, Texas and then Southern California, where he discovered art as a pre-med student at the University of California, Irvine. He studied there under Daniel Joseph Martinez, the artist who was either celebrated or notorious, depending on your point of view, for his contribution to the famously disputatious 1993 Whitney Biennial: a collection of little metal museum tags that each carried a word or two of the message “I Can’t Imagine Ever Wanting To Be White.” Nguyen also imbibed American street culture — hip-hop, break dancing, graffiti. Then, after earning an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, he returned to the city his parents had fled.

Stories, endless stories — that was all he’d known of Vietnam growing up. He moved back to connect with his maternal grandmother, a poet and editor who had stayed behind, but also because he felt a need to experience the place firsthand.

“It was very much out of necessity to try to ground myself there,” he tells Vivian Crockett, the New Museum show’s curator, in the forthcoming exhibition catalog. Crockett — herself the Brazilian-born, New York-based daughter of an American father and a Brazilian mother — described his situation to me as “being of one place and another, and not really of either.” It leaves you with a lot of questions and a deep need for healing.

“It’s important to me to find my way through the world in relation to others,” Nguyen told me. At U.C. Irvine, he was one of several art students mentored by Martinez who called themselves the Renegades. At CalArts, he worked with the Danish art collective Superflex. With the Propeller Group, he clung to the idea of a collective even after it became apparent that the other two members, Phunam Thuc Ha and Matt Lucero, wanted to move on. At this point in his career, Martinez suggested when I phoned him, they may have been doing him a favor. “I’ve worked with collectives. When you work with other people, everything is compromised,” Martinez said. If Nguyen wants to excavate his own history, “he has to do that by himself.”

One of Nguyen’s first major solo works appeared in the 2017 Whitney Biennial: “The Island,” an apocalyptic video set in the speck of Malaysia his family had landed on when he was two. He’d wanted to make a film about Quang Tri for years, he told me, but not until the pandemic hit did the opportunity present itself. Much of the country went on lockdown in 2021, but for parts of that year you could still travel domestically. So he flew north and connected with Project Renew, an N.G.O.-fueled effort to disarm the unexploded shells.

The first thing he noticed “is that you will hear bombs exploding in the distance every few hours” — controlled explosions managed by the likes of Project Renew. The second thing is that there are bombshells everywhere — repurposed as flowerpots, as planters, as coffee shop décor. Bombshells are the only resource this region has left.

“Unburied Sounds” is the story of Nguyet, a fictional young woman in Quang Tri who, like many in real life, makes her living scavenging the metal from unexploded ordnance. Nguyet’s mother has been traumatized by the death of her husband, a scavenging victim. Her friend Lai, playing with cluster bombs when he was 10, was left with one eye and stumps where two legs and an arm should be. Two cousins died in the explosion. Death and dismemberment are constant companions in this place.

Woven into “Unburied Sounds” are a pair of historical figures, the sculptor Alexander Calder and the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, both famed antiwar campaigners in the ’60s and ’70s. Calder’s vocal role was news to Nguyen: “I mean, Calder had taken out a whole page in The New York Times” in 1966, he said. “Which is incredible.”

The young woman in his film has been making large, meticulously balanced, Calder-esque mobiles out of bomb casings. She stumbles across a magazine article on Calder and becomes convinced that she is Calder reincarnated. Seeking counseling, she visits a Buddhist temple and learns its temple bell was made from the casing of an American bomb that could have killed everyone there. A young monk “saw the immense compassion showed by the bomb because it chose not to explode,” she is told, and made it into a bell.

“Unburied Sounds” will be accompanied by two shorter videos that deal with the legacy of French colonialism. “The Specter of Ancestors Becoming” traces the families of Senegalese soldiers who had been forced to fight for the French in Vietnam. “Because No One Living Will Listen” was inspired by Moroccan troops who deserted the French army and resettled near Hanoi.

Nguyen’s interest in such stories was sparked by his realization that his grandfather’s younger brother had been forced to fight against his own people — the forces of Ho Chi Minh — until the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu ended colonial rule. He was dispatched to Algeria to combat the revolt there and was finally posted in the one-time slave colony of Martinique. This explained why Nguyen has cousins in the Caribbean who are Black and speak French. But the history books say nothing about what soldiers from French colonies experienced in Vietnam. Not until Tuan went to Senegal to find their descendants, many of whom have Vietnamese mothers or grandmothers, did he hear their stories.

There’s another video that’s not in the New Museum show but gives it context. Readily available online, it is called “The Sounds of Cannons, Familiar Like Sad Refrains.” For 10 agonizing minutes, Nguyen juxtaposes 1960s Defense Department footage of American warships firing into the jungle with recent video of a bomb-disposal crew nudging a 2,000-pound shell, slowly, gently, to a burial pit to be safely detonated. In Vietnam, with its strong animist tradition, it’s not just humans who have souls but everything. And so the ordnance speaks softly yet forcefully:

The naval officer who was responsible for loading me did not trigger the contact fuse at the tip of my nose. For years I cursed his name. I cursed his inadequacy, his incompetence. For leaving me a shadow of myself. For letting me lay here for almost 50 years. Slowly becoming part of this land. The very thing I was meant to destroy.

And then its voice gives way to the haunting refrains of “A Lullaby of Cannons for the Night,” a ’60s song about central Vietnam by Trinh Cong Son, the South Vietnamese songwriter. It’s the achingly sad lament of those on the receiving end of these immensely powerful, expertly choreographed and ultimately ineffectual agents of obliteration that landed in their fields and villages.

There is a healing moment at the end of this video when the bomb is finally allowed to explode. A similar moment occurs near the end of “Unburied Sounds” when its heroine tries to ease her mother’s pain by striking a bell she made from a bomb. The bell — a sculpture by Nguyen in the exhibition, along with Calder-like mobiles he built from scavenged bomb parts — was tuned to 432 Hz, sometimes considered a healing frequency.

In college, Nguyen said, he wanted to be a doctor because that’s the immigrant dream, but also — and here he apologized for sounding hokey — to help people heal. Art gave him a different way to do that. “My starting point is Vietnam. But my ambition is to extend it beyond just the narratives of Vietnam,” he said — to examine, as the films in this show do, “these global moments that have brought us to where we are now.”