Now Representing – Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work explores the critical impact of storytelling across media including video, sculpture, and installation. Based in sustained community engagement and extensive research, his practice engages with oral history, object biographies, genealogies that span continents, and the lingering stronghold of colonial politics. Brushing the vestiges of colonialism against the grain, his works unearth counter-histories sedimented in cultural artifacts, routes of migration, or the fantasies produced by life in exile.

The relationship between narrative and object informs Nguyen’s video works. Interweaving fiction and fact, their storylines borrow from animist cosmologies and translate material memory into tangible encounters. With their speculative scenarios, his video works hold injury and solace in tension. Their protagonists address complex inheritances, as they tackle well-established notions of belonging, displacement, and redress. His films engender a haunted, sincere, and resistant subtext.

Nguyen’s sculptural practice is deeply attached to material anchors of remembrance and repression. He frequently crafts sculptural works from undetonated explosives. Following the paradoxical nature of this gesture, these sculptures reanimate the past and assume a new life. Situated in the overlap of beauty and terror, Nguyen’s practice draws on, as he put it, “the power to take something that was meant for destruction, harm, and change it to something that has the possibility to heal.”

The artist will have his first solo presentation with Esther Schipper in September 2026 in Berlin.

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 2004 at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. The artist lives and works in in Ho Chi Minh City.

Nguyen has received numerous awards, including the 2025 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2025 Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant, and the 2023 Joan Miró Prize.

Nguyen unveiled two major commissions in late October 2025: Temple, at the National Gallery Singapore as part of the 2025 Singapore Biennale, and Naga, at the Princeton University Art Museum, coinciding with the opening of the museum’s new building. In Spring 2026, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s High Line Plinth commission, The Light that Shines Through the Universe, will go on view.

Nguyen’s major solo presentations include: Tuan Andrew Nguyen: We Were Lost in Our Country, Art Institute Chicago, Chicago (2025); When Water Embraces Empty Space, The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of York University, Toronto (2025), and Edith Russ Haus, Oldenburg (2024); The Other Side of Now, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2024); The Island, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington (2024); Our Ghosts Live in the Future, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2024); Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance, The New Museum, New York (2023); All That We Are Is What We Hold In Our Outstretched Hands, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2023); Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat People, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita (2023), The Contemporary Dayton, Dayton (2021), and Chrysler Museum, Richmond (2021).

Nguyen co-founded and previously served on the board of Sàn Art. In 2006, Nguyen was also a founding member of The Propeller Group, a hybrid entity operating between a fictional advertising agency and an art collective. The group’s work has received international recognition, including the top prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur and a Creative Capital award, among other distinctions.

The artist’s videos and films have been included in major international festivals, biennials, and exhibitions including the 36th São Paulo Biennial (2025); Prospect.6, New Orleans, LA (2024); the 12th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2022); Manifesta 14, Prishtina, Kosovo (2022); Aichi Triennale, Aichi Prefecture, Japan (2022); Biennale de Dakar, Dakar (2022); Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Tapei (2021); Manifesta 13, Marseille (2020); Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah (2019); SOFT POWER, SFMoMA, San Francisco (2019); the 2019 Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah (2019);  2017 Whitney Biennial, New York (2017); the 55th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen (2009); 8th NHK Asian Film Festival, Tokyo (2007); 18th Singapore International Film Festival (2005) and the 4th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Bangkok (2005). 

His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, Nimes; Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco; Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum MACAN, Jakarta; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Taguchi Art Collection, Takahashi City; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester.