Tuấn  Andrew Nguyễn: The Other Side of Now

Zeitz MOCAA presents The Other Side of Now, a solo exhibition of film and sculpture by Vietnamese American artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn which opens August 22, 2024 and will be on show until July 20, 2025.

This exhibition explores the transnational entanglements created by colonisation and war. Attending to the erased voices of Vietnamese, Senegalese, and Moroccan history, it proposes a space for communal healing and remembrance. 

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn was born in 1976, in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Shortly after, he and his family migrated to the United States, where he lived, and eventually graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received his Master of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. Nguyễn currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.   

Nguyễn’s films move along spectrums of fact and fiction, past and present, memory and forgetting. He uses the power of storytelling to create speculative visions of painful histories. He opens a doorway for empathy and healing for both the subject and viewer. In letters to a lost family member, imagined conversations between generations, or reincarnation as a means of healing from physical trauma, his work looks at hard pasts to realise healed futures. 

The exhibition presents three film works: Because No One Living Will Listen / Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe (2023), The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), and The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). All three films are connected by the period 1954 to 1972; between the end of the First Indochina War and the conclusion of the American War in Vietnam. One chapter considers Moroccan soldiers who defected from the colonial army only for their return home to be hindered by the outbreak of the American War. Another tells the story of Senegalese-Vietnamese children and their disrupted connections to family and origin. This affirms a deep engagement with migration narratives stories and charting diasporic experiences in Asia, Africa and beyond. 

Nguyễn creates sculptural objects that materialize his cinematic worlds, placing viewers face to face with relics that carry the weight of generations. These include tangible remnants of war in the five Singing Bowls (2022), constructed from leftover brass artillery shells; delicate embroidered tapestries of Việt Minh propaganda leaflets in Letters From the Other Side (2024); and intimate family photographs in Solidarities Between the Reincarnated (2019). 

The exhibition title highlights the shifts in and between time that are ever present within the artist’s work. What is the other side of “now”? Is it “then”? And when was “then”? And what waits to be revealed when we arrive on the other side? Through narration, Nguyễn’s work probes history to bring to light lost stories that are intertwined with an unclear reality. These might be the same inherited stories that have been told over and over, but in time, there comes a longing to know more, a need to address the questions that were never asked and in turn, never answered. Is it possible to get to the other side and find a different ending? Can we reroute and rewrite histories that are personal and shared with the hope of one day arriving at a place of solace and closure?  

The Other Side of Now forms part of an ongoing series of in-depth, research-based solo exhibitions by Zeitz MOCAA that bring into focus and contextualises the practices of important artists from Africa and the Diaspora, and those whose work focuses on seminal topics in African history. In the spirit of radical solidarity, our programme looks beyond the continent’s borders, attending to new and old entanglements that implicate the world in Africa and Africa in the world.  

Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by Gucci, Mellon Foundation, and BMW South Africa.  This exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.