Fight or Flight or Float or Fall

24 Dec 2024 – 28 Feb 2025
Galerie Quynh
118 Nguyễn Văn Thủ, Đa Kao, D.1, HCMC

From the organizer:

Galerie Quynh is pleased to present Fight or Flight or Float or Fall — a solo exhibition of new work by Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Spanning four exhibition rooms, this experimental body of work focuses on sculptural installations that bring together some of Nguyen’s ongoing research around historical memory, material memory, and strategies of resistance often related to how memory is retained.

Movement is an intrinsic part of the works. Visitors enter the exhibition through a volume of 37 bamboo curtains amplifying the resonance of its hollow stems; air moves around a room gently swaying resting dragonflies balanced on stupa-like pedestals made from UXO (unexploded ordnance); a motor spins a bamboo curtain pole depicting some of history’s most consequential figures; layered bamboo curtains shimmer like watery surfaces as one navigates the works.

Nguyen’s objects are made with materials that contain inherent contradictions. The extraordinary images he highlights also seem to be in conflict with each other, battling for primacy.

The exhibition’s title suggests a call to action — a fight for survival. Throughout the show, images and objects that speak to violence, destruction and trauma are intertwined with empathy, harmony and healing.

About Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Tuan Andrew Nguyen explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fueled 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, Nguyen investigates the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Through collaborative endeavors with various communities throughout the world, Nguyen sets out to cultivate and empower these strategies enacted and embodied by his collaborators. 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.

While Nguyen works between various mediums, he often produces moving-image works and sculpture. Nguyen is intrigued with the relationship between narrative and objects leading him to make projects that combine moving image and sculpture – oftentimes his films begin with an object, such as destroyed memorials built by former refugees, or the skeletal remains of the last rhino in Vietnam for instance, and its story. Approaching memory as a phenomenon that is intangible and abstract, Nguyen often thinks beyond the restrictions of time (past, present, future) which also gives way to thinking about supernaturalisms (ghosts, specters, hauntings) as political tools.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen is the recipient of numerous accolades and awards such as the Joan Miró Prize (2023), Civitella Ranieri Visual Arts Award (2019), and Creative Capital Award (2012). Solo exhibitions include When Water Embraces Empty Space, Edith-Russ-Haus For Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany; The Other Side of Now, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa; Our Ghosts Live in the Future, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain; The Island, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, USA; Radiant Remembrance, The New Museum, New York, NY, USA; It Was What Is Will Be, Marabouparken Konsthall, Sundbyberg, Sweden; and All That We Are Is What We Hold In Our Outstretched Hands, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, UK.

Recent group exhibitions include Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home, New Orleans, LA, USA; Past-Forward: Modern and Contemporary Art from HoMA’s Collection, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA; Spirit House, Cantor Art Center, Stanford, CA, USA; One Way Ashore, a Thousand Channels, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; How Did You Come into the World, Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Hirosaki, Japan; A Spell Against Amnesia, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; Tongues of Fire, Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway; We Were Lost in Our Country, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV, USA; Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics, The Institutum, Singapore; Voice Against Reason, Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia; Present Still, 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; 14th Biennale de Dakar, Dakar, Senegal; Material Memory, TENT: Platform for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands; STILL ALIVE, Aichi Triennale, Aichi Prefecture, Japan; ARS22, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Finland; Manifesta 14, Prishtina, Kosovo; The Ocean and the Interpreters, Hong-Gah Museum, Tapei, Taiwan; In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War, Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines; The Sounds of Cannons, Familiar Like Sad Refrains / Đại Bác Nghe Quen Như Câu Dạo Buồn, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; and Everyone is an Artist: Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany.

In 2006 Nguyen founded The Propeller Group, 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 travelling retrospective that began at the MCA Chicago, the collective has participated in international exhibitions including All the World’s Futures, Venice Biennale 2015, Venice, Italy; Prospect.3: Notes for Now, New Orleans, LA, USA; Made in L.A. 2012, Venice Beach Biennale 2012, Los Angeles, CA, USA; The Ungovernables, 2012 New Museum Triennial, New York, NY, USA; and 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen received a BFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and an MFA from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

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