Van Tran Nguyen, “Strange Agency,” April 28-June 2, 2017

Exhibition Catalog, Van Tran Nguyen and Julia Bottoms

“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic.” – Richard Nixon, No More Vietnams, 1985

Van Tran Nguyen is a Vietnamese American artist whose work is rooted in the residual trauma of the Vietnam War. She has noted that for many Americans, “Vietnam” is not a reference to a place or a culture, but to an event, that event. Her current installation points out ways that western institutions have constructed the narrative of the Vietnam War and how this western construct burdens the present along pathways of Still from Vietnam War Memorial, gender, and race.

In her videos, Vietnam War era propaganda images of women warriors and vulnerable children are projected onto Tran Nguyen’s own body. As she adjusts her pose and her expression, the artist seemingly disappears into the two-dimensional image, unrecognizable within the artwork. In another installation, a video shows the artist washing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Below the gallery projection, water collected during the washing runs continuously from brass spigots into basins. The water in this work and others references both the Potomac River and Mekong Delta while also recalling the fountains and reflecting pools installed across the National Mall. It also serves as a metaphor for memory and introspection. Throughout the exhibition, Tran Nguyen uses the visual languages of both propaganda and memorial to redirect the gaze and subvert the western memory of eastern spaces.

Van Tran is completing her Masters of Fine Arts and Emerging Practices at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the first Biological Art teaching assistant at COALESCE Center of Biological art, a facet of the GEM (Genome, Environment, and Microbiome) group. She also earned her Bachelor of Art and Biology at the University at Buffalo. Tran Nguyen has exhibited throughout Buffalo and had participated in the New York State Summer School of the Arts.