Of Space & Place: On the Nationalism(s) of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s “Our Ghosts Live in the Future”

Exhibition: Our Ghosts Live in the Future by Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Press conference 9 May of 2024. © Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. Photos: Pep Herrero.

Vinh Phu Pham

For all of its tragedies, the ending of the Second Indochina War has profoundly shaped both the United States’ foreign policy and the geopolitical landscape of Southeast Asia. Also known as the Vietnam War, or the American War in Vietnam, the two decades long communism whack-a-mole turned human rights tragedy was a series of coinciding political explosions that culminated in a fractured American public sphere, a unified albeit contentious Vietnamese state, and a deeply resentful, international Vietnamese diaspora, concentrated mostly in the United States. To this day, historians, political theorists, artists, and writers are still captivated and perplexed by the events of the war and its aftermath.

It is no surprise, then, that artists working on depicting the Second Indochina War and its reverberating effects often find themselves trapped within an ideological conundrum, whereby their shared sympathy for global socialist politics–the baseline of many left-leaning artists in the West–are foundationally antithetical to their families’ histories and their understandably staunch anti-communist sentiments. Because of this tenuous ideological divide, artists in the space must be hypervigilant of how their work might be perceived not only in one context, but through a more international lens. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, for example, might work from inside Vietnam, and despite having a now international presence and audience, made his career from the then closed circuit of Vietnamese American art of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Indeed, more than two decades have gone by since the artist returned to Vietnam–a time when many Việt Kiều were just returning for the first time. It was a time when art practices were still stagnant under socialist visions and policies of national culture. Vietnamese art, or art made in Vietnam, were of the people to the service of the people. The local artist networks in Hanoi and Saigon, while existent and producing their own vibrancy, had not yet reached its potential insofar as exposure and proliferation. Nor was the liberalization of the economy under Đổi Mới the providential moment of the country’s final arrival to the art scene, as Pamela Corey and Nora Taylor have noted. Artists who returned home from abroad during this time not only helped to offer new perspectives, but also shaped the new generation of artists by way of expanding their practices. In short, it was as much their style of production and manner of encountering the raw materials of life and history, as it was their movement as transnational citizens which gave rise to this new concept of space and place for Vietnamese art.

Given this complex dynamic, it is worth asking what happens to the nexus of nationalist belonging when the socio-historical context is removed from a work, or when their work is decontextualized from its original intended audience? What other possible understandings of nationalism might there be when the new locations for art works are already charged with their own particular forms of nationalisms, colonial histories, and conception of territorial boundaries?

On exhibit from June 29 – September 17 of 2023, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s “Radiant Remembrance” at the New Museum in New York City was the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Curated by Vivian Crockett and Ian Wallace, the show was a combination of mobile brass sculptures, photographs, archival materials, and video installations. Named after their respective bombing operations (“Rolling Thunder,” “Starlite”), and an attack helicopter during the Vietnam War (“Firebird”), the kinetic mobiles are composed of repurposed 57mm artillery shells tuned to different frequencies for the purpose of psychological healing. Both haunting and imposing, these Calderesque-remnants of the war machine were accompanied by several films including: “The Specter of Ancestors Becoming” (2019), “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon” (2022), and “Because No One Living Will Listen” (2023). Between these three works, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s contemplation of memory, violence, and the legacies of the two Indochina wars are on full display. “Specter of Ancestors Becoming” and “Because No One Living Will Listen,” for example, tells of the aftermath of the French colonial period whereby the displaced, mixed race children of Senegalese and Moroccan military officers and their Vietnamese wives speak to their family histories in a confessional/memoir style. Alternatively, “The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon” follows a young female artist, Nguyet (played by Nguyen Kim Oanh), who is born after the death of Alexander Calder in 1976, and believes herself to be a reincarnation of the famed artist, making similar pieces from recycled scraps of unexploded ordnance. Towards the end of the piece, Nguyet makes a prosthetic arm for Lai (Ho Van Lai, playing himself), another significant character who was maimed as a child, once more toying with the possibility of historical reimagining by upcycling and making use of the materiality of past violence.

Like most if not all “postcolonial” societies, today’s Vietnam is a product of its turbulent past–its colonial history and its cultural identity are not separate or forgotten, but blended into the very source materials that produce the modern conception of the Vietnamese state and nation. If nationalism is an imagined community whose form is proliferated by print capitalism, as theorized by Benedict Anderson, then the vernacular of Vietnamese cultural formation, its grammar, its lexical components, etc…are constituted by both its revolutionary history over the course of the twentieth century, and all the cultural objects born of that very same history.

Similarly, on the other side of the globe, Spain is a country whose past imperial ambitions and turbulent history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in a bloody civil war and a cruel military dictatorship, still leaves a mark on its current cultural identity. In 1975, Spain’s dictator, Francisco Franco, passes away and the country returns to a constitutional monarchy. That same year, Saigon falls, and the two Vietnams became one. Like Vietnam, Spain’s nationalism is a complex arrangement of cultural and ethnic signifiers, a hodgepodge and a confluence of mixing, segregation, and diasporic subjectivities that have coalesced over the course of many centuries. This is not a matter of historical exceptionalism, but a spotlight on the crossroads of mis-encountered intimacies. For both countries, 1975 marks a turning point in political trajectory: a rupture for some, and the restoration of a certain kind for others. Revolution, at the end of the day, is not grounded by any single specter, but a kaleidoscope of different frames. It is rather auspicious, then, that the winner of the eighth Joan Miró Prize of the Fundació Joan Miró, is no other than Tuan Andrew Nguyen.

Entitled, “Our Ghosts Live in the Future” (May 9–September 24, 2024) and curated by Martina Millà, it is the foundation’s first solo show of the Vietnamese American artist. Evolving from, “Radiant Remembrance,” “Our Ghosts Live in the Future” is a contemplation on time, colonialism, and historical memory. True to the spirit of the show’s content, “Our Ghosts Live in the Future” borrows and repurposes several works from the previous show and incorporates mobile sculptures, video installations, and archival photographs.

Unlike in New York, where the show’s signage and written descriptions are only provided in English with occasional French subtitles, here, in the capital of Catalonia, in the building named after the city’s perhaps the most emblematic and surrealist painter par excellence, Joan Miró, whose remains are buried on the very same “mountain,” every single textual element shown is provided in several languages including English, Spanish, and Catalan.

While it is not uncommon for translation to play a role within a multiethnic and multilingual society such as Spain, linguistic and cultural autonomy in Catalonia ought not to be taken for granted considering the centuries of state sanctioned suppression of Catalan identity after the War of Spanish Succession, which punished Catalonia for its support of Phillip V, and after the Spanish Civil War during Francisco Franco’s regime. More crucially, this insistence on a national identity and self-governance, celebrated annually on September 11, also known as la Diada (Diada Nacional de Catalunya), marks a point of referentiality toward the co-habitation of Spain’s uneasy relationship with cultural and political difference. Catalonia, amongst Spain’s seventeen autonomous communities, remains the biggest stronghold for the separatist movement with Barcelona being one of Spain’s most important financial and cultural hubs.

Taking all this into account, the multi-screen projection of pieces like “The Specter of Ancestors Becoming” and “Because No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe” take on a new meaning. In the latter film, Habiba, the mixed race daughter of the Moroccan soldier, wanders around and speaks to the commemorative “Morocco Gate” in the Ba Vì district of Hanoi. Erected between 1956-1960, the unkept gate stands as a reminder of Habiba’s dead father, who died when she was a baby, and who was never repatriated because of the outbreak of the Vietnam War. In the final minutes of the film, the gate opens up to another dimension, collapsing space and time. Like the many civil war monuments that now litter in Vietnam and Spain, each a portal to enmeshed histories of survival, Habiba’s speculative letter to her father–what she would have said, wanted to say–is a moment of redemptive futurity. What was once the expansion of the historical context for the First Indochina War, the outcome of a mixed-bloodline which blended family histories, now mutates to a reflection and a question towards the ethnic purity of that imagined nation. L’Indochine Française, Afrique Occidentale Française, The Republic of Vietnam (RVN), Le Protectorat français au Maroc, The Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), are all as much place names as they are time frames of a country’s violent historical memory, still rich in their myriad forms of contentious identitarian belongings. To that end, what carries on from “Radiant Remembrance”–the radical power of epistemological impressions as a mode of being within the people’s psyche–remains true, but also accumulates a new dimension of a bolstered nationalist identity. Here, the post-war era art of Vietnam’s diaspora is no longer a triangulated discourse between France, the United States, and Vietnam, but instead, transforms into a refracted commentary on the re-imagined spatial politics of the broader postcolonial world. Memory certainly begets old wounds, and it also makes healing possible. And like Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s mobiles, the nationalist conundrum left to our future ghosts and their sense of history is dependent on the present attunement to our sense of space and place.

This article was originally published on DVAN (Diaporic Vietnamese Artists Network)