Tuan Andrew Nguyen wins 2023 Joan Miró Prize

At a press conference held at the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, on May 31, 2023, Marko Daniel, Director of the Fundació Joan Miró, and Alexandros Kambouroglou, Global Programs Director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) announced Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen as the new winner of the Joan Miró Prize.

Nguyen was unanimously selected by an international jury composed of Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director; Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates; Katerina Gregos, Artistic Director, National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens, Greece; Haeju Kim, Senior Curator at the Singapore Art Museum; Ann-Sofi Noring, former Co-Director, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, and currently a member of the Board of the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts; and Marko Daniel, Director, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. The members of the jury, all of them renowned figures in the realm of contemporary art, have selected Tuan Andrew Nguyen from an outstanding shortlist of artists that included Tala Madani, Frida Orupabo, Mika Rottenberg and Haegue Yang. The jury praised all the nominees and reached a consensus to award the prize to Tuan Andrew Nguyen, applauding the extraordinary commitment, depth and imagination of his projects, qualities in keeping with Joan Miró’s career and legacy. In their statement, the jury of the 2023 Joan Miró Prize lauded ‘the social, political and environmental relevance of his work, which is always presented with an astoundingly unique artistic vision. His subtle touch allows him to address some of the most difficult episodes in modern history with playful and poetic clarity.’

As the winner of the Joan Miró Prize, Tuan Andrew Nguyen will receive a 50,000 EUR cash prize and a trophy, and in 2024 will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Fundació Joan Miró, jointly produced with Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

Tuan Andrew Nguyen (1976) lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. His practice is informed by his engagement with communities that have had to deal with traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his exploration of memory, Nguyen investigates the erasure of certain realities by the colonial project. He works using various techniques and his projects often combine moving images and sculptures. In 1979, while still a child, Nguyen moved with his family to the United States of America and grew up in California. There he earned a Fine Arts degree from the University of California Irvine and in 2004 an MFA from CalArts. Over the course of his career, he has received various distinctions for his work in both film and the visual arts, including an Art Matters grant in 2010 and a VIA Art Fund grant. His work has been shown in a number of international exhibitions, among them the Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland, Australia; the Whitney Biennial, New York; the Sharjah Biennial in 2019, and the Berlin Biennale in 2022. His forthcoming projects include Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance, at the New Museum in New York, the artist’s first solo show in an American museum, which will showcase his new film Why No One Living Will Listen (2023) and two recent video projects, The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019).

To broaden its outreach, in this edition of the prize a special educational project has been developed. Involving primary school children and university students, its goal was to provide insights into contemporary art practices through the work of all shortlisted artists. Both projects were documented, and the results were presented to the members of the jury during their deliberation meeting.

Previous winners of the Joan Miró Prize were Olafur Eliasson (2007), Pipilotti Rist (2009), Mona Hatoum (2011), Roni Horn (2013), Ignasi Aballí (2015), Kader Attia (2017), and Nalini Malani (2019).