The New Museum in New York City presents Radiant Remembrance, the first-ever solo museum exhibition in the U.S. by CalArts alum Tuan Andrew Nguyen (Art MFA 04), running from June 29 through Sept. 17. The exhibition precedes another solo show in 2024 at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, Spain, programmed as a result of Nguyen winning the 2023 Joan Miró Prize.
Radiant Remembrance will be installed in the museum’s third floor, showcasing Nguyen’s aforementioned recent projects and works from his wider practice. The artist draws “conceptual threads from across the Global South” with his 2023 film Because No One Living Will Listen. His video works The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon (2022) and The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019) reflect Nguyen’s use of narrative as a vehicle for resistance and empowerment.
The “poetic clarity” of these narratives that move beyond political resistance recently earned Nguyen the prestigious Joan Miró Prize. Established in 2007, the prize is an international award bestowed upon an artist at a “breakthrough stage” in their career. Nguyen was unanimously selected by an international jury who praised the “social, political and environmental relevance of his work, which is always presented with an astoundingly unique artistic vision,” per the foundation’s official announcement.
“I do believe that artists should not be burdened by the politics of the world, by the suffering that is happening,” Nguyen noted in Fundació Joan Miró’s video spotlight (watch below). “It’s up to the artist to burden herself or himself to kind of look at those moments, and to help us all figure a way out.”
As the 2023 recipient of the Joan Miró Prize , Nguyen receives a cash prize of €50,000 and a trophy, and will be the subject of a solo show at the Fundació Joan Miró next year, co-produced with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
Based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Nguyen’s practice explores the potential of memory as an act of political resistance, and bears a “commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war, and displacement.” His work has been selected for numerous international exhibitions, including the 2017 Whitney Biennial for his video installation The Island, the 2019 Sharjah Biennial, and the 2022 Berlin Biennale.
