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Tuan Andrew Nguyen wore a distinct
cabbie cap the night we met at a café on the
outskirts of Los Angeles in late February.
The hat served as something of a thinking
cap and although the peripatetic, down-
to-earth Nguyen had only been in town
for a few days, he revealed he was crafting
something subversive in the City of Angels.
Based in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC),
Nguyen was visiting LA to acquire a life-
sized, osteological reproduction of a Javan
rhinoceros skull, which he special-ordered
from a skeletal replication company, Bone
Clones, Inc., in Canoga Park.
The day after, Nguyen would take the
skull to New York in preparation for his
installation Skin and Bones (2017) at the
Armory Show. The piece demystifies the
mythology behind the curing powers of
rhino horn in Chinese and Vietnamese
culture, with the sobering realities of illegal
poaching. He commissioned traditional
lion-dance costume makers in Cho Lon, a
predominantly Chinese district of HCMC,
to produce the mask of a rhino instead
of a lion, which is traditionally worn in
performances during Chinese New Year
celebrations. “I wanted to see what it would
look like to juxtapose the rhino mask with
the skull of the rhino—the last Javan rhino
in Vietnam—that was hacked to death in
2010, to explore the relationships between
skin and bones, science and mythology.”
Nguyen often spotlights societal and global
issues metaphorically through objects, such
as animal craniums, or conceptually with
moving image.
Born in HCMC in 1976, Nguyen and his
parents immigrated to the United States from
Vietnam in 1979. He studied at the University
of California, Irvine, and the California
Institute of the Arts, where he discovered
experimental documentary filmmaking as
a method of probing social, political and
cultural identity. “I’m seduced by film and
like that it is a little bit more accessible to the
average viewer.”
In 2005, shortly after moving back to
Vietnam, Nguyen shot a documentary,
Spray It, Don’t Say It (2006), about the first
generation of graffiti artists in Vietnam, with
artist Phu Nam Thuc Ha. Together, they
founded the Propeller Group, and for more
than a decade the collective has been creating
films, video art and interdisciplinary projects
with sociopolitical and cultural themes
predominantly tied to Vietnam. To avoid legal
repercussions, since politically sensitive
content is often censored or forbidden
in Vietnam, the duo also operated as a
commercial video production company, TPG
Films, producing low-budget music videos to
earn a stable income. In 2009, Nguyen asked
his friend from CalArts, Matt Lucero, to join
the collective. As a trio, the Propeller Group
continues to adopt ambitious projects. “We’re
a conceptually based collective that expands
and extends ourselves to different media. We
look at how people are affected by certain
issues and think about strategies for how to
explore—or complicate—those topics.”
The Propeller Group has had a museum
survey show traveling across the US since
June last year. The exhibition presents videos
and related artworks from the past five years,
and it is the first time these projects have been
shown together. Nguyen is proud of the
execution behind The Living Need Light,
The Dead Need Music (2014), included in the
presentation. The single-channel, 21-minute
film parallels the fantastical traditions of
funereal bands in South Vietnam with those
of New Orleans. “We approached it as a music
video, where the band members became the
stars of the film. The relationships we had
with singers and stars from our work in past
music videos were applied, so that the
musicians, the transgenders, the transvestites
of these funerals became powerful.” For
Nguyen, the film focuses not on the
ritualization or celebration of death but on the
performers as “superhuman characters.”
Today the Propeller Group remains as
a collective, but no longer as a production
company. “When we decided not to do
commercial work anymore it was at once
very scary but liberating,” revealed Nguyen.
“It was a moment when we realized the
reality of making a living off being artists.”
As seen in Skin and Bones, Nguyen as a
solo artist is developing a newfound interest
in mythology. This research is also reflected
in his 42-minute film, The Island (2017),
which debuted at the Whitney Biennial in
March. Set on the fabled Pulau Bidong, a
Malaysian island that was one of the largest
and longest-running refugee camps after the
American-led war in Vietnam (1955–75), the
film superimposes footage from the island
with a science-fiction narrative about a man
and woman who meet there after a nuclear
war near the South China Sea. It questions
global politics, trauma and humanity in
the future, but provides a visual guide as
Nguyen recounts the history and remaining
relics of former Vietnamese refugees. This
project allowed him to remain anchored to
his heritage and tie in childhood memoriesof stories told by family and the Vietnamese
diaspora community. “My first visit to the
island in 2015 was magical. Suddenly, I was
able to put my feet on this land that had been
shrouded with stories. Pulau Bidong was a
charged historical space, but when I got there,
it was a pristine beach where I needed to trek
through the woods to find these monuments
left by people who shared the same history as
me. It was overwhelming and haunting.”
Nguyen struggled to edit The Island in
part because it felt personal. The artist’s
parents were among the displaced after the
war. When his family arrived in the US, they
were sponsored by a church in Tahlequah,
Oklahoma, and moved to Southern California
when Nguyen was in high school. He recalls
the 1992 Rodney King riots three months after
moving to LA and the ensuing national debate
regarding police brutality and racial injustice.
This exposure to identity politics—in addition
to urban street culture, dissidence and graffiti
in relation to public space—became a catalyst
and recurring thread in his work.
Nguyen’s family also imparted politically
minded principles. In 2004, the artist moved
to Vietnam to reconnect with his then
83-year-old grandmother, a former writer and
intellectual. “She became editor-in-chief of a
newspaper critiquing the war from both sides.
There are stories of her facing off a squadron
of Communist police officers after the war;
she could disarm a situation with her words.”
Like his grandmother, Nguyen champions
creative and political progress. In 2007, he
co-founded HCMC’s leading nonprofit art
space Sàn Art with renowned Vietnamese
artists Tiffany Chung and Đinh Q. Lê, the
latter of whom he met as a student at UC
Irvine. The vision behind Sàn Art is to
provide local artists with international
knowledge and exposure. However, the
Vietnamese government denied three of
its exhibitions licenses last year due to
ambiguous regulations regarding attendance
of foreigners at its events. As a result, Sàn Art
has scaled down its programming. Separately,
Nguyen, along with Lê, is concentrating on
creating a yearlong curatorial program that
trains local artists and creatives on how to
foster critical thinking in Vietnam.
As a cultural champion for Sàn Art, and
a conceptual storyteller for the Propeller
Group, Nguyen has been equal parts fighter
and thinker. Reflecting on his career,
he notes, “It’s important to take risks in
your practice. Sometimes it doesn’t work
out so well, but you test your limits and
understand yourself a little bit more.”