Photograph by Dario Lasagniīecause No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe (2023), Nguyen’s most recent film to examine Vietnam’s postcolonial history, takes an even greater speculative turn. Installation view of Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance, New Museum, New York, 2023. The reenactment of a granddaughter combing her grandmother’s hair appears on a different screen, while on another a woman faces the camera directly and mouths the words heard in the narration: “Did the black soldier return?” The immersive approach brings to life the anecdotes hidden within family photos while simultaneously acknowledging the gaps for what may never be known. In one of three stories, a woman silhouetted in profile, speaking into a microphone, recounts a memory in French the English subtitle reads, “I remember you stood in front of a rifle in Indochina to save a black man.” Timeworn portraits flash across an adjacent screen, showing a younger version of the grandmother whom the speaker is addressing and the Black man in question, her grandfather. He captures their complicated legacies in The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), a “metafictional” project, first shown at the Dakar Biennale in 2022, that features imagined conversations narrated over four video channels. In addition to connecting with families in Senegal who sent him the archival photographs installed at the exhibition’s entrance, Nguyen collaborated with the descendants of the Senegalese soldiers who, during the 1940s and ’50s, were sent by the French to fight anticolonial uprisings in Southeast Asia, and the Vietnamese wives they brought back home with them. Nguyen explains, “I use the archive as a counterpoint to what I’m doing, creating a counternarrative and working with people that are marginalized or have been disregarded in the dominant narrative to bring their stories to the forefront.” Still from Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019 Still from Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019 He clarifies that he’s referring to official records, which often preserve only one side or a partial version of history. “I would go out on a limb and say that the archive is quite useless,” he tells the exhibition’s curator Vivian Crockett in a conversation for the accompanying catalog. While research remains integral to Nguyen’s practice, he also understands its limits. In Radiant Remembrance, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s first solo exhibition in a US museum, the Vietnamese artist expands the possibilities of collective memory and storytelling through film and video installations, as well as archival material and sculptures. These moments, spanning several decades, represent generations of the Vietnamese Senegalese community in Dakar, whose stories have often gone untold or have been deliberately suppressed. It’s easy to imagine the mix of black-and-white, sepia, and color prints in the background of someone’s living room, rather than hanging on a gallery wall. On the third floor of the New Museum in New York, the elevator doors part to reveal a series of framed photographs in which uniformed soldiers stare stoically at the camera, a groom wraps an arm around his smiling bride on their wedding day, women and children pose for formal studio portraits, and extended families gather around dining tables eating and laughing.
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