We Were Lost in Our Country Tuan Andrew Nguyen We Were Lost in Our Country Tuan Andrew Nguyen
September 5, 2025—March 9, 2026
Art Institute of Chicago

We Were Lost in Our Country Tuan Andrew Nguyen

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Exhibition view, We Were Lost in Our Country, Art Institute of Chicago, September 5, 2025 - March 9, 2026. © Tuan Andrew Nguyen 2025. Courtesy of the artist, James Cohan, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Press Release

For the Ngurrara people of Western Australia, Country is not just a place.

 

The word also signifies kinship with the lands, waters, and skies of the Great Sandy Desert, which the Aboriginal communities of the Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala, and Juwaliny language groups have stewarded for millennia. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film We Were Lost in Our Country explores how these communities established legal rights to their ancestral land by creating the monumental painting Ngurrara Canvas II in 1997.

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Tuan Andrew Nguyen
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Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Saigon, Viet Nam. In 1999, Nguyen graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine, and completed a Master of Fine Arts in...