Tuan Andrew Nguyen Burning, 2026

The sculpture Burning is a mobile made of engraved and pounded brass artillery shells. From a brass ring at the top, an engraved shell casing is suspended at the center, its surface patterned with snake scales. From the shell a single stem descends and divides into paired branches, each curved arm terminating in a small hammered disc. The artillery shell is tuned as a bell to 647.27 hertz, a frequency associated with healing properties.

The work belongs to Nguyen's series of mobiles made from artillery shells salvaged in Vietnam, where unexploded ordnance from the extensive US bombing campaign remains embedded across the country, endangering communities and restricting the safe use of land. Drawing on a local tradition of repurposing such ordnance into objects for daily use, the artist describes the impulse behind his practice as "the power to take something that was meant for destruction, harm, and change it to something that has the possibility to heal." The mobiles play on the viewer's familiarity with American sculptor Alexander Calder's visual language, then allow us to experience their alienness. The work references Nguyen's 2022 film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, whose protagonist—believing herself to be the reincarnation of Calder—uses the very material that killed her father to heal her troubled mother. Calder, whose work came to be associated with US Cold War values, was in fact an active opponent of the Vietnam War, producing anti-war materials and in 1977 declining the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in protest.