Art by Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Nguyen left Vietnam as a child refugee by boat in 1979, grew up in Oklahoma and Southern California, and eventually returned to Vietnam as an adult, where he co-founded the artist collective The Propeller Group and the independent art space Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City. His solo work, often moving-image installation, deals directly with the lingering material legacy of war, including "Unburied Sounds" (2022), made using metal melted down from actual Vietnam War-era ordnance. In October 2025 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, commonly called a "genius grant," recognizing decades of work connecting personal displacement to the region's larger colonial and wartime history.