Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn: When Water Embraces Empty Space

A majestic hand-carved wooden boat is the protagonist of Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s new solo exhibition, When Water Embraces Empty Space. The story of the boat, past and present, spreads throughout the entire building, told through video installations and collaboratively made objects.

The sixteen-meter-long outrigger sailboat in question is called the Luf boat, named after the Papua New Guinean island from which it originates. The local and ancient knowledge in the region, of both plants and the ocean, required to build such a boat is nothing short of remarkable. Generations who grew up in Berlin know the magnificent object from school excursions to the Ethnological Museum in Dahlem. Since 2020, part of the museum’s collection has been housed in the Humboldt Forum; here, the Luf boat is presented as the institution’s crown jewel.

According to the historian Götz Aly in his book The Magnificent Boat, the arrival of the Luf boat to the Berlin collection has a dark and troubling history. The object is connected to the sustained violence that the Imperial German Navy and German traders perpetrated on the people of Papua New Guinea. The islands’ forest and natural resources were destroyed and replaced with plantations, which the Papuans were forced to work on, and the colonizers raped local women. When the islanders resisted these atrocities, the Imperial Crown ordered their massacre through so-called punishment expeditions—as happened on Luf.

In 2021, the Humboldt Forum commissioned a video interview with descendants of the few Luf inhabitants who survived this colonial aggression. They expressed their wish to see the boat, mourned their community’s lost knowledge of how to produce this type of watercraft, and expressed a hope to reconnect with it.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn ‘s exploration started from this juncture: his goal became to fulfill this wish and make the meeting possible. The artist believes that the Luf boat is a bridge between the past and the future, between the dominant narrative of German colonialism and the erased stories of the people of Papua New Guinea. It is a bridge between fact and fiction, testimony and resilience.

The exhibition’s series of multichannel film installations together present a narrative built from conversations between the Luf boat builders’ descendants,—Stanley Inum, Fordy Stanley and Enoch Lun—and the Humboldt Forum team as well as documentation of the islanders’ long-awaited meeting with the boat. Other videos present footage of the Luf community’s attempt to rebuild the boat. The aim is to create an object that would resolve the relationship between object and narrative, between maker and keeper, and between trauma and healing.

Colonialism destroys and controls memory. In the wake of all this destruction, what strategies do we have to recuperate memory? Can fiction fill in the gaps, give agency, and act as a tool of healing inside the voids that remain?

Maybe the boat needs to float out of the museum, where it is being displayed, and disappear in the oceans as it was meant to be—a sea burial for the chief of Luf or for a larger more metaphorical burial, one of the continuation of colonial ideals in our current times.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. The Vietnamese/US artists’ practice is fuelled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Nguyễn investigates the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Through this collaborative practice, he explores memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, emphasizing the power of storytelling as a means for healing, empathy and solidarity. 

Nguyễn has received several awards in both film and visual arts, including an Art Matters grant in 2010 and a VIA Art Fund grant. He won the Joan Miró Foundation award in 2023. His work has been included in several international exhibitions including the Asia Pacific Triennial 2006, the Whitney Biennial 2017, the Sharjah Biennial 2019 and Berlin Biennale 2022.

Nguyễn co-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.