In 2020 State of Concept proudly presented Tuan Andrew Nguyen's works as part of State Affairs.
State Affairs, since 2017 is an exhibition chapter dedicated to artists that work with video and the moving image. It presents artistic practices that focus on thematics unfolding and narrated gradually through several artworks, practices distinguished for their interest in shedding light on historical conditions and how they affect contemporaneity. The practices selected for this exhibition chapter are characterized by an essayistic approach to issues that involve, racism, religion, futurism, post-colonial discourse, nationalism etc., at times blending, documentary, performance and the moving image. The programme aims to directly address current affairs, predicaments, problematics and cul-de-sacs of contemporary living, by at times, summoning the past.
His latest creation, "The Boat People" (2020, duration 19') was at the time screened at MOMA in New York. The film is set in an unspecified post-apocalyptic future at the precarious edge of humanity’s possible extinction. It follows a band of children led by a strong-willed and resourceful little girl. They travel the seas and collect the stories of a world they never knew through objects that survived over time. The film "The Island" (2017, duration 42 '), is shot entirely on Pulau Bidong, an island off the coast of Malaysia that became the largest and longest-operating refugee camp after the Vietnam War. The artist and his family were some of the 250,000 people who inhabited the tiny island between 1978 and 1991; it was once one of the most densely populated places in the world until the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees shuttered the camp in 1991. The third film is a collective production of the Propeller Group entitled "The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music" (2014, duration 24') a film that merges documentary footage of actual funeral processions with stunning re-enactments discussing funeral traditions in Southern Vietnam.
ON VIEW: 2nd July–17th July 2020
Tuan Andrew Nguyen (b. 1976) was born in Saigon, and currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Andrew Nguyen is a multimedia artist who explores identity, memory, and history and their complex interrelationship within the context of exile and cultural estrangement. He earned a BFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 1999, and received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He co-founded Sàn Art, an artist-run exhibition space in Ho Chi Minh City (est. 2007) and is a founding member of the artist collective The Propeller Group (est. 2006). The group appropriates marketing and advertising strategies to investigate power structures and economic systems, and often focuses their work on Vietnam and the rapid rise of capitalism in this formally Communist country.
