Join Tuan Andrew Nguyen for the the 2024 Lijin Lecture and a screening of his film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022). The program will begin with a short artist talk, followed by the screening and Q&A with the artist and curator Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander.
For multiple generations, the residents of Quảng Trị on the North Central Coast of Vietnam have lived with the physical residue and lingering trauma of war, in one of the most heavily bombed areas in the history of modern warfare. The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon explores the ways in which material contains memory and holds potential for transformation, reincarnation, and healing.
The film centers around a woman named Nguyệt, who is the lone caretaker for her mother and their scrapyard business. The labor is backbreaking and tedious but she manages to do it alone. As a reprieve from her life, Nguyệt makes beautiful hanging sculptures from bomb scraps that look almost exactly like Alexander Calder’s work. Nguyệt soon realizes that she's the reincarnation of Calder—famous for his kinetic sculptures and very outspoken against the war in Vietnam. But what would it mean that she's now making those sculptures, using bomb material in Vietnam?
Two other works by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, sculptures made with brass from artillery shells, can be seen in the exhibition Spirit House, on view at the Cantor Arts Center from September 4, 2024 through January 26, 2025.