Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn (also known as Tuan Andrew Nguyen) (born 1976) is a Vietnamese-American artist known for moving-image works, sculptures and installations.Rose, Frank. "Making Art Out of Bombshells and Memories in Vietnam," The New York Times, June 16, 2023. Retrieved January 29, 2024.Tancons, Claire. "Top Ten: Tuan Andrew Nguyen," Artforum, December 2018. Retrieved January 30, 2024. His work taps into counter-memory, testimony and dialogue as forms of political resistance and empowerment, highlighting unofficial and underrepresented histories involving the fragmented consciousness of colonial inheritance and the cultural estrangement of expatriation and repatriation.Tan, Lumi. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Pointed and Poetic Forms of Storytelling," Art in America, March 17, 2023. Retrieved January 29, 2024.Curiel, Jonathan. "Andrew Nguyen Explores Colonial Legacy," SF Weekly, January 29, 2020. Retrieved January 29, 2024.Glass, Joshua. "The Vietnamese American Artists Searching for Identity," The New York Times, June 23, 2023. Retrieved January 31, 2024. He interweaves factual and speculative elements—archival resources, fiction, explorations of material memory embedded in objects (animism), and supernatural realms—in order to rework dominant narratives into poetic vignettes that imagine alternate forms of healing, survival and political potentiality.Vali, Murtaza. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen, James Cohan" Artforum, September 2022. Retrieved January 30, 2024.Wong, Harley. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Mystical Art Brings People In Touch With Lost Ancestors," ARTnews, April 8, 2020. Retrieved January 30, 2024.Brown, Jeffrey. "Artist examines legacy of Vietnam War and its impact on his own life in new exhibition," PBS News Hour, August 21, 2023. Retrieved February 29, 2024. In 2023, New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote, "Nguyen is a documentarian and an assembler of broken things with a preference for collaboration. His work aims to heal the fragmented lives and retrieve the suppressed memories of the marginalized people most affected by colonization, war and displacement, especially in Vietnam."Smith, Roberta. "In the Art of Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Vietnam’s Nightmares Live On," The New York Times, August 10, 2023. Retrieved January 29, 2024. In 2025 he was named a MacArthur Fellow by the MacArthur Foundation.
Nguyen's work belongs to the public art collections of the Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Artists. Retrieved January 29, 2024. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Enemy's Enemy: Monument to a Monument, Artwork. Retrieved January 29, 2024. Singapore Art MuseumSingapore Art Museum. "After Utopia," Events. Retrieved January 29, 2024. and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA),San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Artist. Retrieved January 29, 2024. among others. In 2023, he received the Joan Miró Prize.Fundació Joan Miró. " 2023: Tuan Andrew Nguyen," Joan Miró Prize. Retrieved January 29, 2024. He has exhibited at international exhibitions and film festivals including the Whitney Biennial,Whitney Museum of American Art. Tuan Andrew Nguyen The Island, Collection. Retrieved January 29, 2024. Sharjah Biennial,Masters, H.G. "In Depth: Tuan Andrew Nguyen," Art Asia Pacific, May/June 2019. Berlin BiennaleWatlington, Emily. "7 Standout Works at the 2022 Berlin Biennale, From 'Vomit Girl' Sculptures to Videos Reflecting on the Vietnamese Diaspora," ARTnews, June 13, 2022. Retrieved January 30, 2024. and Manifesta,Hatfield, Zack. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen," Artforum, October 19, 2020. Retrieved January 31, 2024. and a solo show at the New Museum. He is a cofounding member of the artist collective The Propeller Group and is based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Propeller Group, Artist. Retrieved January 31, 2024.
Early life and career Nguyen was born in 1976 in Sài Gòn - Gia Định. He and his family emigrated as refugees to the United States in 1979, and he grew up in Oklahoma and then Southern California. Initially a pre-med student, he earned a BFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1999.Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Artist. Retrieved January 29, 2024. As an undergraduate he developed an inclination toward collective artmaking as a member of a graffiti crew; this would solidify in his later work with The Propeller Group and solo projects with various ethnic communities. He continued his art studies at California Institute of the Arts under Daniel Joseph Martinez, earning an MFA in 2004.
That same year Nguyen returned to Vietnam and settled in Ho Chi Minh City, in part out of a desire to understand and learn from his grandmother, who became a writer and published poet there at a young age. After the move, the country and its trials became a recurrent subject in his work.Nguyen, Vuong Thao. "Empty Forest: Dissecting the Fraught Relationship Between Man and Animal," Saigoneer, January 22, 2018. Retrieved January 30, 2024. Nguyen's early exhibitions included solo shows at Voz Alta Projects (San Diego, 2004) and Galerie Quynh (Ho Chi Minh City, 2008), the 2006 Asia Pacific Triennial, and screenings at international and experimental film festivals.Gallery Quynh. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Artists. Retrieved January 31, 2024.Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art. "The 5th Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT5)," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 31, 2024.Moxley, R. Scott. "Vietnamese International Film Festival, Part II," OC Weekly, October 31, 2003. He cofounded the artist-run alternative space Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City in 2007.Pearlman, Ellen. "In Vietnam, Contemplating the Future of Contemporary Art," Hyperallergic, March 18, 2015. Retrieved January 30, 2024.
The Propeller Group
In 2006, Nguyen co-founded The Propeller Group (TPG) with artist Phunam Thuc Ha; they were joined by Matt Lucero in 2008. For roughly a decade, TPG was the focus of Nguyen's efforts with large-scale collaborative projects that bridged fine art and mainstream media, including online viral campaigns, film productions, television commercials and installation art.Garcia, Cesar. "The Propeller Group," Made in L.A, Anne Ellegood et al (eds.), Munich: Prestel, 2012. TPG's work often combined contradictory concepts and strategies: public and private, political ideology and branding, low and high culture.Swan, Ethan. "The Propeller Group," The Ungovernables, Eungie Joo et al (eds.), New York: Rizzoli/The New Museum, 2012.Rose, Frank. "Is It an Art Collective or a Vietnamese Ad Agency? Yes and Yes," The New York Times, February 23, 2018. Retrieved January 31, 2024. The collective was featured in a traveling retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2016) and selected for the Guangzhou Triennial (2012), Venice Biennale (2015), and surveys at the Guggenheim Museum, New Museum and SFMOMA. In 2017, Phunam and Lucero withdrew from the group; Nguyen is still associated with TPG.
The contradictory concepts that Nguyen experimented with in The Propeller Group can be seen in their debut film AK-47 vs. M16, the Film that draws aesthetic influence from Hollywood, education documentaries, and utilizes YouTube clips in a 40-minute montage.“The Propeller Group: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago - Document - Gale In Context: Biography.” n.d. Accessed December 10, 2025. https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?p=BIC&u=sara04588&id=GALE%7CA470367499&v=2.1&it=r&sid=summon&aty=shibboleth. These themes have been explored by Nguyen with The Propeller Group in various media, such as in Television Commercial for Communism, another video in 2011 released by the group, and then in the series of paintings, Proposal for a Vietnamese Landscape (2005-2006), and several of the collective’s films. The group has approached themes of continued American influence post-war and consumerism with what reviewers have characterized an irreverence and distinct from the melancholy tone that pervades over the reception of Vietnamese artists.
Work and reception Critics describe Nguyen's individual projects as more personal, subtler and more ambitious than his work with TPG.Lai, Ophelia. "My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires: Tuan Andrew Nguyen,"] 'Art Asia Pacific, August 2018. They draw upon both his own family's experience and the stories of others—Vietnamese-Senegalese people, the Aboriginal Ngurrara of Western Australia, migrants in Marseilles and endangered animals, among others.Jaskunas, Paul. "Time Traveling at the Whitney," Full Bleed, May 3, 2017. Retrieved January 30, 2024. His projects have remained collaborative, as well as participatory, directly engaging with communities to devise and enact narratives, intergenerational dialogues, personal accounts and performances. The resulting works have been noted for their reflective, multi-perspectival character, lack of didacticism and refusal to reduce or erase cultural contradictions.Ha Thuc, Caroline. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Animal Tales and the State of War," Cobosocial, January 26, 2018.
Nguyen frequently combines moving images and objects in his installations. His videos and films have dramatized paradoxes involving belief, mythology, decolonial politics, cultural legacies, consumerism and ecology. According to Artforum critic Murtaza Vali, Nguyen's sculptural work "seeks to give visibility and voice to displaced and marginalized communities, often through 'testimonial objects,' i.e., physical repositories of memory that retain the agency to narrate these recollections." For example, he has repurposed objects ranging from decorative animal statuary to salvaged bombshells from the American war in Vietnam (1955–75) in order to examine the traumas of war and extinction (e.g., A Rising Moon Through The Smoke, 2022).Cotter, Holland. "Art We Saw This Spring: Tuan Andrew Nguyen," The New York Times, April 27, 2022. Retrieved January 29, 2024. His Enemy's Enemy: A Monument to a Monument (2009) consisted of a baseball bat with the image of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc's 1963 self-immolating protest against the US-backed South Vietnamese government carved into it; the sculpture commented on cultural inheritance, a newly unveiled official monument to the event, and the use of such objects to serve political exigencies.Carré d'Art, Musée d’art contemporain. Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Enemy’s Enemy: A monument to a monument, Collection. Retrieved January 29, 2024.
Since 2017, Nguyen has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Asia Society,Asia Society. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Letters from Saigon to Saigon," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 31, 2024. Joslyn Art Museum,Joslyn Art Museum. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 31, 2024. Ulrich Museum,Ulrich Museum of Art. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat People," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 31, 2024. Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow and New Museum ("Radiant Remembrance," 2023), among others; the New Museum exhibition was featured on the PBS NewsHour in August 2023.The New Museum. "Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Radiant Remembrance," Exhibitions. Retrieved January 29, 2024.Centre for Contemporary Arts. "All That We Are Is What We Hold In Our Outstretched Hands," Programme. Retrieved January 29, 2024. He has also shown at the James Cohan Gallery in New York and Galerie Quynh.
Individual works and exhibitions