INDRA'S NET / BOOTH IN3
Preview (invitation only): October 12–13, 2022
Public Days: October 14–16, 2022
The Regent's Park, London, UK, NW1 4LL
Featured as part of Indra's Net - a focused section of Frieze London curated by Sandhini Poddar (Adjunct Curator, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi) - Galerie Quynh is presenting two new works by Tuan Andrew Nguyen.
The contemplative and tranquil kinetic sculptures entitled Broken Into A Thousand Arms and I Dreamt I Was A Butterfly Or A Bomb, 2022, reflect Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s inexhaustible fascination with material animism and reincarnation. When fused together such concepts create a space for rethinking history, mending broken bonds, and suggesting a different future. Through these works, Nguyen reimagines the possible afterlife of deadly unexploded ordnances still buried underground in many provinces in central Vietnam decades after the war. The destructive weapons are transformed into objects with healing qualities. Found in scrapyards in Quang Tri, the once rough and hefty artillery shell is now newly manifested through the time-honoured processes of pounding, casting, and polishing: ethereal brass plates that float and occasionally shimmer in the air, shining sacred prosthetic arms, and a halo that complete a forgotten Guan Yin statue. The reworked components steer us away from the trap of amnesia serving as a kind of memorial to a history that still resonates to this day.
A deliberate homage to Calder’s mobiles and stabiles, the sculptures reference Nguyen’s 2022 film The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon in which the female protagonist, believing that she is the reincarnation of the famed American sculptor, uses the same element that killed her father to heal her troubled mother. Of striking presence, the two works pulsate between dichotomies of violence and compassion, chaos and balance, profanity and sanctity.
Broken Into A Thousand Arms is made of a found wooden Guanyin or Avalokiteshvara statue (with missing limbs) — a deity of compassion, who grew one thousand arms upon hearing the cries of sentient beings. The hands are particularly important for the Guanyin statue as they are a symbol of the deity’s blessings, with each mudra and object indicating different meanings. With a new set of prosthetics cast from artillery shells, the statue’s sacred status has now been restored. Using the same gesture, in I Dreamt I Was A Butterfly Or A Bomb, Nguyen has given the severed Guanyin a new life. Here, she is balancing a Calder-inspired mobile in her palm – the brass discs move and turn following the flow of air.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen sees a strong connection between the Buddhist statue with missing limbs, and the victims of bombings, unexploded ordnances, and cluster munitions in Vietnam. The former is deprived of its divinity, while the latter normal life. If the polished prosthetic arm could restore the statue’s divine status, perhaps it could also deify the resilient victims that history has left behind.
