Tuan Andrew Nguyen is not interested in playing it safe. How could he be, when one of his primary mediums is unexploded bombs?
The artist has always been interested in the stories of those affected by war in his native Vietnam. In “Sacred Forest / Rừng Thiêng,” his new solo show at Norr Cohan on view through Dec. 19, the 50-year-old artist transforms artillery shells, shell casings, and unexploded bombs, also known as ordnances, into symbols of collective healing, while his new film captures how the legacy of violence reverberates and transforms across generations.
Born in Saigon, Nguyen emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of 3. After earning an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004, he promptly returned to the country he left before he could remember, relocating to Ho Chi Minh City. In awarding him a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship in 2025, the jury praised Nguyen for recovering “histories that would otherwise be lost” and piecing together “fragmented cultural inheritances for future generations.” This year, his work was included in the Venice Biennale, and he unveiled a 27-foot-tall Buddha sculpture on New York’s highly trafficked High Line.
His fourth show with Norr Cohan leads viewers through the rugged landscape of Quảng Trị, reimagining the central Vietnamese region from a place of military activity to an enchanted forest. He reconstructs the summits of Tiger Tooth Mountain, where the U.S. Marines posted troops during the Vietnam War and hammers shell casings into the shape of a dragon. “The war ended more than 50 years ago, yet its remnants continue to shape the landscape and the everyday lives of people who were born generations after it,” Nguyen tells CULTURED.
As he often does, Nguyen cast non-professional actors to star in the film, including an 8-year-old girl named Khuyên. Nguyen looks at the lasting impact of war through her eyes—a child who has never experienced it, but is nevertheless coming of age in its wreckage as her parents work to clear unexploded ordnances from the surrounding forest. CULTURED spoke with the artist about the process of creating the film, how his own family history informs his work, and why the best art is best made in collaboration.
Your new video explores the enduring impact of unexploded ordnance in the Quảng Trị region in Vietnam through the eyes of an 8-year-old whose parents worked to clear these dangerous remnants of war. What made you want to return to this place and this subject, which you’ve explored in previous work, through a little girl’s eyes?
I’ve returned to Quảng Trị many times because it’s a place where the past refuses to remain in the past. I’ve always been interested in how memory is transmitted, particularly when those who inherit it have no direct experience of the events themselves.
Children have a remarkable capacity to move between different realities, between what is visible and invisible, what is possible and impossible. Through Khuyên’s eyes, the forest can be both a place of danger and a place of wonder. Her perspective opened up possibilities for storytelling that weren’t confined to the logic of historical documentation, allowing the film to move between memory, mythology, and speculation without necessarily distinguishing one from the other.
I think what drew me to Khuyên’s perspective was the possibility of looking at this landscape without being entirely bound by the histories of violence that have come to define it. She doesn’t necessarily see it as a wounded landscape in need of repair. Ultimately, returning to Quảng Trị through Khuyên’s eyes was a way of shifting the question from what war has left behind to what might still be possible.
Your work is often informed by your own personal and family history. Did your own family story shape this film?
My family history inevitably shapes the way I approach storytelling, even when the stories themselves are not directly connected to my family. Growing up in the Vietnamese diaspora, I inherited a relationship to a country and a history that I knew largely through the memories, silences, and experiences of others. Much of my understanding of Vietnam was shaped by stories of war, displacement, and loss, but also by the resilience, humor, and imagination of the people who lived through those experiences.
But my relationship to Quảng Trị (and Dakrông), and particularly to the Bru-Vân Kiều communities in Đakrông, is very different from Khuyên’s. I come to this landscape with a certain historical understanding of the war, whereas Khuyên belongs to a community whose relationship to these mountains and forests extends far beyond that history. I think what interested me was precisely this difference in perspective. What does this landscape mean to someone whose ancestors have lived in relation to it for generations, and whose imagination is shaped by a spiritual world that exists alongside the material remnants of war?
In some ways, my family history is what first led me to ask questions about memory and the enduring consequences of violence. But the relationships I’ve developed with people in Quảng Trị over the years have pushed me to think beyond my own inherited narratives.
Your videos require extensive research, travel, and budget. Each one is a feat to produce. Can you tell us the backstory of how this one came together logistically and technically?
My filmmaking process is fundamentally built around relationships rather than production. We’ve been collaborating with PeaceTrees Vietnam, an NGO that works to clear unexploded ordnance in Quảng Trị, for several years now. We met Khải, Duyên, and their daughter Khuyên a couple of years ago. I was immediately struck by her charisma, curiosity, and how naturally she carried herself in front of the camera.
I work primarily with non-professional actors. I’m interested in creating situations where people aren’t simply reenacting their stories, but actively participating in how those stories are imagined and told. In that sense, the distinction between documentary and fiction becomes less important to me than the relationships that make the storytelling possible.
Like many of my other films, this one was written alongside the people who appear in it. I usually begin with certain ideas, questions, or images that I want to explore, but I try not to impose a fixed narrative too early. Rather than asking someone to perform a character in a conventional sense, I’m often trying to create a situation in which they can bring something of themselves into the scene.
Of course, there’s an enormous amount of planning, research, and coordination that goes into making these films, especially when working in remote locations with limited resources. But I think the most important part of the process happens long before the cameras begin rolling. It’s the time spent building relationships, listening, sharing stories, and developing trust. For me, those relationships aren’t simply a means to making the film. They’re part of the film itself.
The film is presented alongside a monumental stabile and a suspended installation of mobiles fabricated from reclaimed brass artillery shells. How do you source these materials?
I have collaborators in Quảng Trị who help me source materials. Sometimes I’ve collected fragments myself, returning to sites where unexploded ordnance has been safely detonated. Other times, the materials come through demining organizations working in the region. Over the years, these relationships have allowed me to understand the extraordinary labor, care, and risk involved in removing them from the landscape.
I’m interested in the histories that materials carry, particularly objects that have been designed for violence. An artillery shell is manufactured with a very specific purpose, and even after it has been rendered inert or fragmented, it retains something of that original intention. There’s a strange contradiction in working with these remnants. Brass is an incredibly beautiful material, but in this context, its beauty is inseparable from a history of destruction.
What sort of transformation or alchemy are you looking to enact when you use them to make sculpture?
The transformation begins with the possibility of changing the relationship these objects have to the world. Something that was once designed to explode, to fragment, to penetrate, is reconfigured into something that responds to movement, gravity, wind, and sound. A weapon is designed to impose its will upon the world. A mobile, by contrast, can only exist through its responsiveness to the world around it.
The sound is also important. These fragments, which were once part of objects designed to produce extraordinary violence and noise, are now capable of producing entirely different kinds of vibrations and resonances. There’s something poetic about that reversal, the possibility that a material once associated with destruction might now invite us to listen more closely.
But I don’t think of this transformation as a form of redemption. If there’s an alchemy taking place, it’s in the possibility of redirecting the material’s purpose without erasing its past.
What role does sound play in your sculpture?
Sound has always been an important part of my practice, particularly in the films, but increasingly I’ve been interested in how sound can exist as a sculptural material in its own right. Unlike an image or an object, sound doesn’t remain fixed in one place. It travels, reverberates, and moves through our bodies. We don’t just hear sound; we feel it. There’s something incredibly powerful about its ability to create a physical experience while remaining largely invisible.
The sculptures are tuned in relation to 432 Hz, a frequency that has often been associated with ideas of harmony and resonance with the natural world. I’m less interested in making claims about its therapeutic properties than in the poetic possibility of bringing these remnants of war into a different relationship with their environment.
I think sound also offers another way of thinking about memory. Memories aren’t always visual or narrative. Sometimes they’re carried through a voice, a melody, a vibration, or a sound that we recognize before we can explain why. Sound can bring the past into the present without necessarily representing it.
How do you see this show in relation to your High Line Plinth commission? In what ways are they exploring similar themes?
I see the two projects as being very much in conversation with one another. The High Line Plinth commission, The Light Shines Through the Universe, takes its inspiration from the larger of the two Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, known locally as Salsal, which was destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. The sculpture isn’t an attempt to reconstruct or replace the original monument, but rather to create an echo of something that no longer exists. The hands of the sculpture are cast from melted brass artillery shells sourced from Afghanistan, so there’s a material transformation taking place that is very similar to the works in this exhibition.
But perhaps what connects them most deeply is a belief that the meaning of an object, a place, or a history is never entirely fixed. Violence attempts to impose a certain finality upon the world, whether through destruction, erasure, or the disruption of lives and communities. I’m interested in how art might resist that finality, not by reversing what has happened, but by opening up spaces for other relationships and other ways of imagining what might still be possible.
In what ways are they distinct?
There’s a difference in how the two projects approach time. The High Line sculpture looks toward something that has been violently removed from the world, while the film and sculptures in this exhibition are concerned with the ways the past continues to unfold in the present, particularly through the experiences of a younger generation that has inherited the consequences of a war they never lived through.
With the High Line sculpture, I’m interested in how we might listen to an absence. With the works from Quảng Trị, I’m interested in what happens when the remnants of violence are given another life, another voice.
What’s an artwork or who is an artist that has informed the way you’ve been thinking about your own work?
I find myself inspired by people whose work exists outside the field of art. People who dedicate their lives to helping others, often under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, and whose contributions rarely receive the visibility or recognition they deserve.
Through my work, I’ve had the privilege of meeting people who clear unexploded ordnance from former battlefields, people who work to protect children living in war-torn regions, and communities who continue to care for one another despite generations of violence and displacement. Organizations like PeaceTrees Vietnam, for example, have been doing this work for decades, quietly and persistently, making it possible for people to reclaim their land and imagine futures beyond the legacies of war. Their work requires a kind of faith in the future, a belief that the conditions of the present are not necessarily permanent. I find that profoundly inspiring.
I often think about the relationship between art and these forms of work. Of course, they operate in very different ways, and I would never want to suggest that making art is equivalent to the often life-saving work that these individuals and organizations do. But I think they share something essential: the capacity to imagine possibilities where they might otherwise seem impossible.
Perhaps that’s what continues to inform my own practice most deeply. The belief that imagination is not simply an escape from reality, but something that can help us transform our relationship to it.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Documentary Now! 10 Films as Revolutionary as ‘You Can See Everything
The Critics’ Table in London: Emily LaBarge Reviews 11 Shows’
Delaney Rowe Is Trading Her TikTok Fame for Off-Broadway Stardom. Alex Edelman Has Questions.
Meet the Style GOATs Behind the Best-Dressed Athletes in Sports
These Museum Staircases Give Social Climbing a Whole New Meaning
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
