Naga,

2024

Comprised primarily of pounded and polished brass plates cast from unexploded bomb metal and artillery shells, Naga encapsulates Nguyen’s interest in materials as repositories of memory and experience. The artist gathered the weaponry during a mission with NGOs to remove unexploded ordnance from around the border that fissured Vietnam into north and south, one of the most heavily bombed areas in the history of modern warfare.

The materials inventory the intergenerational destruction and trauma wrought by the Vietnam War, but their reconfiguration by Nguyen transcends the destructive nature of war to center the potential for healing based on theories of reincarnation. He arranges the metal plates into a kinetic mobile that evokes the sculpture of Alexander Calder, an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War who died the year of Nguyen’s birth, and he alters the surface of the metal detritus to emit what is believed to be a therapeutic tone when struck. Suspended over a representation of Medusa, the monstrous figure from Greek mythology who converted living beings to stone, Naga contributes to a meditation, across history and geographies, on violence and the possibility of artistic transformation.