Tuan Andrew Nguyen
The Specter of Ancestors Becoming,
2019
4-channel video installation: colour, 7.1 surround sound 28 minutes,
Variable Dimensions
The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019) is a four-channel video installation that expands on the legacies of Senegalese soldiers, or Tirailleurs sénégalais, that were deployed to Indochina to combat the Vietnamese uprising against French rule.
After World War II, France sought to reestablish its colonial position in Indochina. Following unsuccessful negotiations for independence with the French in 1946, war broke out between Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh forces and French troops in the northern part of Vietnam. These troops would include the tirailleurs. The conflict would continue until the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. This defeat would be described by Frantz Fanon as the beginning of the end of the French Empire. It would lead to the 1954 Geneva Conference and contribute to the American establishment of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization that same year.
The work is a collaboration with Vietnamese-Senegalese descendants, wherein personal family histories and artefacts are evoked through three dramatized stories. The stories capture the experience of Vietnamese women and their children who migrated to West Africa with Senegalese husbands who had been stationed in Indochina or of those who took their mixed-race children and left their Vietnamese wives behind. Written, read, imagined, and acted out by descendants, the stories also present the experience of these children as they face racial prejudice and the attempted erasure of their affinities to Vietnam, pointing to the fraught dynamics that structure the historical imagination of decolonizing societies, evolving over generations and spilling into the contemporary.
Born in 1976 in Sai Gon, Viet Nam, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice explores strategies of political resistance enacted through countermemory and post-memory. Extracting and re-working narratives via history and supernaturalisms is an essential part of Nguyen’s video works and sculptures where fact and fiction are both held accountable. Nguyen received a BFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. Nguyen has received several awards in both film and visual arts, including an Art Matters grant in 2010 and best feature film at VietFilmFest in 2018 for his film, The Island. His work has been included in several international exhibitions including the Asia Pacific Triennial 2006, the Whitney Biennial 2017, and the Sharjah Biennial 2019. Nguyen founded The Propeller Group in 2006, a platform for collectivity that situates itself between an art collective and an advertising company. Accolades for the group include the grand prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur for the film The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music and a Creative Capital award for their video project Television Commercial for Communism. Besides a major traveling retrospective that began at the MCA Chicago, the collective has participated in international exhibitions including The Ungovernables (2012 New Museum Triennial), 2012 LA Biennial, Prospect3 (2014 New Orleans Triennial), and the Venice Biennale 2015.
