Galerie Quynh at Frieze Seoul 2024
04 – 07 Sep 2024
Booth A4 – Hall C, COEX
513 Yeongdong-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, South Korea
From the organizer:
Galerie Quynh is thrilled to return to Frieze Seoul with a presentation of new sculptures by Tuan Andrew Nguyen. Currently featured in a number of institutional exhibitions worldwide including major solo shows at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Nguyen’s work resonates across cultures in its power to encourage dialogue, listening and empathy. Collaborating with communities and researching sites of trauma often associated with colonialism, war and displacement, Nguyen poignantly loops and weaves together memory, history and the present to speculate possible futures.
Nguyen’s new sculptures were developed in relation to his 2022 film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon. The film reflects the resilience of the communities in Quang Tri – a province in Vietnam that is one of the heaviest bombed regions in history. Though Vietnam is no longer at war, the remnants of the American bombings more than half a century ago is a present reality for those who have lost limbs and lives due to unexploded ordnance (UXO) scattered throughout the region. The fictional film centers on Nguyet, a troubled young woman who buys and sells bomb metal. Nguyet makes mobile sculptures from the bomb material and learns how to tune them to frequencies that promote healing. Believing she is the reincarnation of Alexander Calder, Nguyet embarks on a meaningful journey that culminates in finding peace for her and her family.
Nguyen regards UXO as a form of memory, relics embedded in the earth that bear witness to history and countless stories untold. The new mobiles at Frieze Seoul represent the renewal of once destructive materials. Each work, tuned to various frequencies, will reverberate with sound during the fair.
About Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn
Tuan Andrew Nguyen is one of the most acclaimed artists working today. He is the recipient of many 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 a Boat Becomes a Burial, Edith-Russ-Haus For Media Art, Oldenburg, Germany (forthcoming); 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; Radiant Remembrance, The New Museum, 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.
Nguyen has participated in numerous group exhibitions such as Prospect.6: the future is present, the harbinger is home, New Orleans, LA, USA (forthcoming); Spirit House, Cantor Art Center, Stanford, CA; A Spell Against Amnesia, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Tongues of Fire, Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway; 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; The Sounds of Cannons, Familiar Like Sad Refrains / Đại Bác Nghe Quen Như Câu Dạo Buồn, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; Everyone is an Artist: Cosmopolitical Exercises with Joseph Beuys, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; Phantasmapolis: 2021 Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Tapei, Taiwan; The Earth is Flat Again, curated by Jakub Gawkowski, Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, Lodz, Poland; In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War, Vargas Museum, Manila, Philippines; 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA; Manifesta 13 Marseilles, Marseilles, France; Say it Loud, Bonnefanten, Maastricht, Netherlands; … of bread, wine, cars, security and peace, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Bodies of Water, 13ᵗʰ Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai, China; Seismic Movements, Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, Bangladesh; Rights of Future Generations, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah, UAE; So Far So Right, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan; SOFT POWER, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA; Where the sea remembers, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Leaving the Echo Chamber, 14ᵗʰ Sharjah Biennale, Sharjah, UAE; Homeworks, Beirut Biennial, Beirut, Lebanon; and THE GARDEN – End of Times; Beginning of Times, AroS Triennial, Aarhus, Denmark.
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.
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.
