Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (still), Single-channel video installation, 4k, color, 5.1 surround sound, 58 min., 2022. Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn (also known as Tuan Andrew Nguyen) (born 1976) is a Vietnamese-American artist known for moving-image works, sculptures and installations. His work taps into counter-memory, testimony and dialogue as forms of political resistance and empowerment, highlighting unofficial and underrepresented histories involving the fragmented consciousness of colonial inheritance and the cultural estrangement of expatriation and repatriation. He interweaves factual and speculative elements—archival resources, fiction, explorations of material memory embedded in objects (animism), and supernatural realms—in order to rework dominant narratives into poetic vignettes that imagine alternate forms of healing, survival and political potentiality. In 2023, New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, "Nguyen is a documentarian and an assembler of broken things with a preference for collaboration. His work aims to heal the fragmented lives and retrieve the suppressed memories of the marginalized people most affected by colonization, war and displacement, especially in Vietnam." In 2025 he was named a MacArthur Fellow by the MacArthur Foundation.

Nguyen's work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Singapore Art Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), among others. In 2023, he received the Joan Miró Prize. He has exhibited at international exhibitions and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, Berlin Biennale and Manifesta, and a solo show at the New Museum. As an undergraduate he developed an inclination toward collective artmaking as a member of a graffiti crew; this would solidify in his later work with The Propeller Group and solo projects with various ethnic communities. He cofounded the artist-run alternative space Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City in 2007.

The Propeller Group

In 2006, Nguyen co-founded The Propeller Group (TPG) with artist Phunam Thuc Ha; they were joined by Matt Lucero in 2008. TPG's work often combined contradictory concepts and strategies: public and private, political ideology and branding, low and high culture. These themes have been explored by Nguyen with The Propeller Group in various media, such as in Television Commercial for Communism, another video in 2011 released by the group, and then in the series of paintings, Proposal for a Vietnamese Landscape (2005-2006), and several of the collective’s films. The group has approached themes of continued American influence post-war and consumerism with what reviewers have characterized an irreverence and distinct from the melancholy tone that pervades over the reception of Vietnamese artists. They draw upon both his own family's experience and the stories of others—Vietnamese-Senegalese people, the Aboriginal Ngurrara of Western Australia, migrants in Marseilles and endangered animals, among others. His Enemy's Enemy: A Monument to a Monument (2009) consisted of a baseball bat with the image of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc's 1963 self-immolating protest against the US-backed South Vietnamese government carved into it; the sculpture commented on cultural inheritance, a newly unveiled official monument to the event, and the use of such objects to serve political exigencies.

Since 2017, Nguyen has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Asia Society, Joslyn Art Museum, Ulrich Museum, Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow and New Museum ("Radiant Remembrance," 2023), among others; the New Museum exhibition was featured on the PBS NewsHour in August 2023. The exhibition's objects—neoritualistic masks, costumes-sculptures and mutations of animal statues on altar-like pedestals bathed in eerie purple neon light—together suggested a chilling spirit forest haunted by violence, greed and devastation; the show's title, "Empty Forest," is an ecological term for viable ecosystems void of large mammals due to hunting, poaching or deforestation. The video, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, centered on a woman who runs a small junkyard with her mother on the outskirts of Quang Tri one of the most heavily bombed areas in history, still haunted by a legacy of death and dismemberment, physical residue and the ongoing danger of unexploded ordnance (UXO). The showcase explored the erased histories and transnational impacts of colonialism through three films and several sculptural relics, including singing bowls forged from discarded brass artillery shells.

Nguyen's statue of Buddha, The Light That Shines Through the Universe, is on display from Spring 2026 to Fall 2027 as the Plinth commission for the High Line in New York City. The 27-foot-tall sandstone statue and two bronze hands pay homage to the now-destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan which were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001.

Collections and awards Nguyen's work belongs to the public art collections of The Burger Collection (Switzerland), Carré d’Art (Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, France), Kemper Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Singapore Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

On October 8, 2025, Nguyen was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, popularly known as the MacArthur Foundation's “Genius Grant.”