Artist examines legacy of Vietnam War and its impact on his own life in new exhibition

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: An exhibit at the New Museum in New York explores the legacy of the Vietnam War through the film and sculptures of an artist whose own life has been defined by that very legacy.

Jeffrey Brown takes a look for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: In the opening scene of "The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon," a Vietnamese folk song plays over a strange scene, a flower pot in a field, which we slowly realize is fashioned from a bombshell.

Artist and director Tuan Andrew Nguyen:

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Artist and Filmmaker: I was thinking about the landscape and how beautiful the landscape is, but just right below the surface of the land lays like this memory of the war that is still very volatile.

Jeffrey Brown: The film is part of an exhibition titled Radiant Remembrance at the New Museum in New York by the 47-year-old Vietnamese-born, American-raised artist, winner of this year's prestigious Joan Miro international art prize, works in different forms and shapes, video installations, archival photographs, freestanding sculptures, all exploring narratives of often forgotten or lost history.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: My work is very much about the power of memory, the power of storytelling as an act of political resistance, to remember something, to retell something and tell the story.

Jeffrey Brown: That hasn't been told before.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: That hasn't been told before, that isn't being acknowledged by dominant narrative.

Actress (through interpreter): So, you're trying to help me by bringing all these bombs home? We're surrounded by the objects of death.

Jeffrey Brown: "The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon" is a fictionalized version of a grim reality in the Quang Tri region of Central Vietnam, where the U.S. military carried out some of the most ferocious and destructive bombing in history.

And, to this day, unexploded ordnance, or UXO, litters the landscape, killing and maiming civilians.

Actor (through interpreter): Do you remember this?

Jeffrey Brown: The film tells the story of a young woman who ekes out a living scavenging and selling metal from the bombs, but also making sculptures of them that have an eerie resemblance to those of the American artist Alexander Calder, who she learns died the year she was born.

For Nguyen, this is about loss, hauntings, reincarnation, the possibility of healing.

In that sense, it goes on.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: It goes on.

Jeffrey Brown: And never ended.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: And it's never-ending here for the people there. I think that's the history that we have to kind of remember. War doesn't end when we think it does.

Jeffrey Brown: For the exhibition, Nguyen has crafted his own large sculptures, a large bomb bell, and a mobile of metal from scavenged ordnance tuned to a frequency thought to help heal people suffering from PTSD.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: They have an amazing resonance. You can kind of feel the vibrations, turning material that was meant to destroy into something that heals.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, all this hidden and continuing history is tied to Nguyen's own story. He was born in Vietnam just after the war. His father was a former South Vietnamese draftee.

When Nguyen was 2, the family escaped by sea as so-called boat people to a refugee camp in Malaysia. They were eventually accepted into the U.S. as refugees.

Do you have any memory of that?

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: I don't remember the experience on the boat or the refugee camp.

My -- one of my earliest, first memories was the plane ride from Malaysia to San Francisco. I think I was crying so much that the flight attendant gave me a Dennis the Menace comic book. And I remember that.

(laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: Really?

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Yes. That was...

Jeffrey Brown: As your first exposure to Western culture?

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: But also my first memory, like being kind of in the air, and then getting this graphic object about a young boy who was causing a lot of problems.

(laughter)

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Dennis the Menace.

Jeffrey Brown: He grew up in Oklahoma, Texas and Southern California hearing stories of his homeland. And after college and art school, he went back to Vietnam to live with his maternal grandmother, a poet, writer and journalist who had stayed behind.

Nguyen has lived in Vietnam ever since, now with a family of his own. And he's made films about other continuations of history, French colonial soldiers from Senegal who fought in Vietnam and had relationships and children with Vietnamese women.

He worked with the contemporary Senegalese-Vietnamese community in Dakar to document part of that little-known story. And he's crafted other works about mixed communities and migrations we rarely hear of. He himself has relatives in Martinique in the Caribbean that date to French colonial wars.

For all this, he credits the stories he was told in childhood.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Refugees, for those that are displaced, especially children, stories become not only a relic of a previous life. They're a kind of inheritance. But they also...

Jeffrey Brown: One you don't know.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: One you don't know.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: And, sometimes, when I was growing up, I felt like I would never know, because access to Vietnam was -- seemed impossible back then.

But these stories also simultaneously kind of very aggressively propel you into a future. That's the impact of storytelling on me. I think that has kind of impressed deeply upon my psyche and the way that I think about making art.

Jeffrey Brown: That art can now be seen through September 17.

For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown at the New Museum in New York.