Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat People

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat People
January 26 — May 6, 2023
Wichita State University
Mon.-Sat.: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. | Closed Sundays, University & Major Holidays | Free Admission 316.97v8.3664
@ulrichmuseum | ulrich.wichita.edu | 1845 Fairmount Wichita, KS | 67260-0046

This exhibition presents a single work:
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, The Boat People, 2020. Single-channel video, 4k, super 16mm transferred to digital color video,
5.1 surround sound. 20 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.
The Ulrich Museum would like to express deep gratitude to the artist and the staff at the James Cohan Gallery, particularly
Paula Naughton, for their assistance in making this exhibition and publication possible. The Ulrich is grateful
for the ongoing support of Salon Circle members who make the Museum’s exhibitions and programs possible
through their Salon memberships. We also receive funding for general operational support from the City of Wichita
and Wichita State University.
Public Program
Chau Thuy: A Boat People Survivor’s Story of Hope
February 16, 2023
5:30 p.m. Reception
6 p.m. Program
In conjunction with the exhibition Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat People, Chau Thuy, President and Founder of the
Vietnamese Heritage Museum, will share his passion for preserving the history, art, and culture of Vietnamese Boat
People. His own extraordinary journey as a refugee is reflected in his art and the books he has authored.
Cover :
Tuan Andrew Nguyen,
The Boat People (still),
2020. Single-channel
video. Image courtesy
the artist and James
Cohan, New York.
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Burning Desires: Looping Past and Future in Tuan Andrew Nguyen’sThe Boat People
“That idea of liberation is so interesting, to liberate yourself from the histories that hold you, and at
the same time, to be empowered by those histories.” –Tuan Andrew Nguyen 1
Tuan Andrew Nguyen,
The Boat People (still),
2020. Single-channel
video. Image courtesy
the artist and James
Cohan, New York.
One way of valuing a work of art has to do with how many
ideas it opens onto and how many connections between
them it allows a viewer to make. A related way of valuing art asks
what temporal frame a work is relevant to, with the past, present,
and future being the typical options. For me, the appeal of Tuan
Andrew Nguyen’s The Boat People is that the scope of possible
connections and paths for making sense of this work is so great
and varied that the work is equally relevant to how we think about
both the past and the future from the perspective of the present.
Made in 2018-2020, Ngueyn’s video contains a minimal and very
loosely outlined plot. A group of five children—an older girl of
perhaps 10 or 12 and four younger boys whom she has picked
up on her journeys—travel around by boat in a post-apocalyptic
world after an unspecified catastrophe. The only adult the children
reference is the girl’s mother, who died some time ago. As
far as anyone knows, the kids are the only humans left alive. They
find themselves in Bataan, a city and province in the Philippines,
where they explore abandoned sites of human habitation. They
spend the most time at the locations that memorialize sites of two
large-scale 20th century human tragedies. The first is the 1942
Battle of Bataan waged during World War II and the subsequent
Bataan Death March, a forced relocation by the Japanese army
of 60,000-80,000 Filipino and American prisoners of war during
which thousands died on the way. The second is the exodus of the
Boat People—refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—
who fled war and regime change in Indochina and arrived in the
Philippines starting in 1981, with an estimated 400,000 people (the
same number of people as the entire current populaton of Wichita)
passing through the Philippine Refugee Processing Center (PRPC)
in Bataan over the course of a decade. Hundreds of thousands
more are believed to have died at sea during their journeys.
As they explore the lush yet desolate world around them, the
children seem to intuit that some objects hold particular symbolic
power in representing the momentous events in the past. The children
carve uncannily accurate wooden replicas of these objects and
then set them on fire in order to release the ghosts of the past and
set the objects free. On the beach, the young girl finds a head of
ambiguous origin—perhaps severed from a statue of Guanyin or the
Buddha found nearby. Most of the video consists of a conversation
between the girl, who speaks Tagalog, and the head, which appears
to come alive and spe aks English. The film closes with a vision of
the head—presumably a wooden replica of the original stone?—
burning on the beach.
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What can we do to set the past free in order to have a future?
That is a central question of The Boat People, which the film
addresses by placing its protagonists in a world where the mutual
interdependence of these two temporalities is particularly evident.
The film appears to be set in the future. Given the camera’s frequent
fixation on ocean water, that future seems to be one in which
climate change predictions have come true and ocean rise has
Salukat ensemble. The music sounds electronically inflected and
sci-fi “futuristic” but is created using Indonesian gamelan—an
ancient musical tradition centered on percussion instruments that
dates as far back as the 3rd century CE.
In Javanese mythology, the king who invented the gamelan created
a gong in order to summon the gods and the other percussion
Tuan Andrew Nguyen,
The Boat People (still),
2020. Single-channel
video. Image courtesy
the artist and James
Cohan, New York.
human life, perhaps causing the civilizational catastrophe to which
the children allude. Current projections estimate that future global
mean sea level rise will range anywhere from 1 to almost 7 feet by
2100 and up to 12 feet by 2150. 2 Countries in Southeast Asia that
are surrounded by water, such as the Phillippines, will be particularly
vulnerable to the destruction of both human habitat and food
supply chains, creating the possibility of large numbers of climate
refugees. Globally, the projections for the number of climate refugees
who will be displaced by 2050 range from 200 million to 1.2
billion people. 3
Change on this scale is nearly impossible for humans to conceive—
or cope with imagining, given the guilt before future generations that
it might justly provoke in the people of the present. Our collective
reluctance to imagine the impact that science has long predicted
makes artistic attempts to do so particularly important. Nguyen’s
fixation on the way the people of the future might view their past is
a sobering, visceral reminder that those of us living today might also
one day be part of the nameless masses who will be evaluated for
their role in shaping future people’s present.
And what is there to do for the children of the future who have no
“future” as humanity has understood it for the last several centuries?
Adept at basic survival, the kids in The Boat People are obsessed
with setting free the past they cannot grasp but which haunts them
and the land around them. “We seek the stories of our ancestors.
Of who we once were,” says the girl. The idea of the past haunting
the future is reinforced both visually and sonically, through the eerie
soundtrack created by composer Dewa Alit and the Gamelan
instruments in order to relay more complex messages. The use of
gamelan instruments is thus singularly fitting for this film, given that
the children in The Boat People spend much of their time interacting
with images of the diverse deities whom the 20th century Boat People
erected to seek spiritual solace. Refugees at the PRPC came
from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The images they brought with
them and replicated at PRPC rveflect the diversity of Southeast
Asia’s religious and artistic traditions. They include Khmer depictions
of Brahma or Buddha copied from the Bayon temple complex in
Cambodia; Buddhist depictions of Guanyin, the Boddhisatva of
infinite mercy and compassion; and Christian figures of the Virgin
Mary and Pope John Paul II, who visited the PRPC in 1981.
In the film, the children do not understand the theological nuances
that separate these different gods. Indeed, they cannot even
grasp the concept of “god.” But they do sense that these particular
images contain powerful concentrations of affect—of love, hate,
despair, hope, fear—that have an effect on everything and everyone
that comes after until the unresolved pain of the past is drained of
its power. Like most viewers of The Boat People, the children are
confounded by all the remnants of the past they encounter, which
seems to be part of the film’s point. It takes great effort to figure out
just how many layers of history haunt this landscape, and reconstructing
history in post-apocalyptic conditions is beyond the protagonists’
abilility. The solution they invent for resolving and releasing
the hold of the past on the future is brilliant in its simplicty—the
children decide to burn it all in order to set it all free.
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y copies are light, and they bring the past into the future,”
“Mthe girl says. “And burning brings nowhere to everywhere. I
remember she [the girl’s mother] told me to burn her so I could keep
going.” The act of burning wooden replicas is rooted in Hindu and
Buddhist burial rites, which dispose of a body efficiently through fire
once the spirit has left to be reincarnated into a different body or realm.
In interviews, Nguyen has also noted the powerful positive associations
of fire and burning in Vietnamese culture that come from both
influential acts of individual political resistance, such as the self-immolation
of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc in 1963, and everyday
practices, such as the bvurning of votive offerings for the benefit of
deceased ancestors. Thus rooted in Southeast Asian spiritual practices,
the children’s implicit cosmology sees fire as a necessary symbol
and agent of change within an inexorable life-cycle of all things. Under
controlled circumstances, fire clears out clutter, symbolizing transition,
presence in the now, and release from suffering.
The burning of replicas symbolizes in the film the breaking of cycles
of tragedy which run in repeating loops. As the talking head on the
beach tells the girl, “This whole region was engulfed in flames once.
First in war, then in re-enactment of war. They destroyed the jungle.”
Here, too, Nguyen emphasizes the long-term impacts of human
actions not just on people but on whole ecosystems, alluding to the
use of the herbicide and defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam
War. The line about the destruction of the jungle, according to the
artist, also alludes to the fact that parts of the film Apocalypse Now
(1979) were shot not far from Bataan, and the filmmakers burned
down forest for some of their footage—one of the choices made in
that film that arguably perpetuated the imperialist hubris that so often
underpins American discussions of the Vietnam War even by people
critical of it.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen,
The Boat People (still),
2020. Single-channel
video. Image courtesy
the artist and James
Cohan, New York.
At the same time, the children’s approach in no way rejects the
importance of the past in shaping any given present. The labor
they put into carving the replicas of ancient power objects seems
to create an intense identification with the pain of the past. Equally
importantly, the choice to burn copies rather than originals allows
material culture to continue to exist undisturbed and available for
others in the future to create their own relationships to the past. The
children brilliantly separate historical facts, which remain in all their
immutability and muteness, from historical affects, the emotional
power of the stories attached to the objects, which the kids do
not want to fester as unresolved trauma. “On one hand, I think
of replicas as a kind of ‘reincarnation,’” Nguyen has said in one
interview about his work. “On the other hand, I have to insist that
replicas don’t exist. Each subsequent ‘replica’ performs differently,
hence, I think that these things we call ‘replicas’ are actually very
different from the ‘original.’ I think of them as different incarnations
of the same desire to understand the world at various moments of
rupture, i.e. pandemics, war, environmental disasters.” 4
Fascinatingly, the interest in at once salvaging, replicating, and
releasing a difficult past also exists in The Boat People outside the
frame, on a meta-level. The film was produced on location in Bataan
with the help of the Bellas Artes Projects foundation, a non-profit
art center founded by curator Jam Acuzar, who also stars in the film
as the talking head we see on the beach. Launched in 2013 and
shut down by the COVID pandemic, Bellas Artes Projects operated
“in the restored and transported Casa Quiapo, site of the first arts
school in the [Philppines],” which Acuzar helped revive as a place to
connect international artists with local artists and artisans through
residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and cultural tourism. 5 Acuzar,
moreover, is the daughter of Jose Acuzar, the real estate developer
whose Bataan resort Las Casas Filipinas de Acuzar served as the
location of several scenes in The Boat People and is a collection of
historic Filipino houses relocated and reconstructed in Bataan for a
new purpose.
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Tuan Andrew Nguyen,
The Boat People (still),
2020. Single-channel
video. Image courtesy
the artist and James
Cohan, New York.
To delve more into the world of the Vietnamese Boat People while
thinking about Nguyen’s The Boat People, I read Vietnamese
American writer Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do. In
it, Bui narrates her family’s harrowing experiences of fleeing Vietnam
and resettling in America—a story that bears at least surface resemblance
to Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s early life of coming to America
with his family as a refugee at age three. Throughout her book,
Bui’s authorial voice shifts between that of a child trying to survive
and make sense of the chaos around her and an adult delving into
her family’s painful past after the birth of her own son. Watching
The Boat People in light of Bui’s book and the child’s voice she is
able to capture, I wondered how trustworthy the young protagonist
of the video is. Are she and her companions really the last people
left on Earth? Or are they, perhaps, children who simply think that
they are, given the chaos and indifference of the surrounding adult
world? Might the stories they tell themselves be another tool of psychological
self-defense against upheaval, akin to their steampunk
headgear, which clearly cannot provide much actual protection but
might offer the psychic benefit of a feeling of safety and protection
for fragile hopes for a better future. Like the children in The Boat
People, Bui in her book seeks origin stories that would allow her to
understand the trauma that shaped her. Like the children, she does
so mainly in the service of setting her own son free from it.
1 Harley Wong and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, “Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Mystical Art Brings
People in Touch With Lost Ancestors,” ARTnews, April 8. 2020, https://www.artnews.
com/art-news/artists/tuan-andrew-nguyen-interview-1202683390/.
2
Rebecca Lindsey, “Climate Change: Global Sea Level,” Climate.gov, April 19, 2022,
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-globalsea-level.
3 Moira Lavelle, “By 2050, 200 Million Climate Refugees May Have Fled Their Homes.
But International Laws Offer Them Little Protection,” Inside Climate News, November
2, 2021,
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/02112021/climate-refugees-international-law-cop26/
and Sean McAllister, “There could be 1.2 billion climate refugees by
2050. Here’s what you need to know,” Zurich, January 13, 2023, https://www.zurich.
com/en/media/magazine/2022/there-could-be-1-2-billion-climate-refugees-by-2050-
here-s-what-you-need-to-know.
4 May Adadol Ingawanji and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat
People,” Vdrome, July 8, 2020, https://www.vdrome.org/tuan-andrew-nguyen/.
5
Milie Walton, “The Apollo 40 Under 40 Asia Pacific in focus: Jam Acuzar,” Apollo
Magazine, September 22, 2022, https://www.apollo-magazine.com/jam-acuzar-apollo-40-under-40-asia-pacific-in-focus/.
6 May Adadol Ingawanji and Tuan Andrew Nguyen, “Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat
People,” Vdrome, July 8, 2020, https://www.vdrome.org/tuan-andrew-nguyen/.
The fact that in the end, the temporal setting of The Boat People
is as mysterious and unresolvable as so many other questions it
raises should be heartening to a thoughtful observer. Nguyen has
said of his protagonist, “She is not merely a survivor, but a creator—
the bridge between the past and the future, the space between
two worlds.” In the same interview, he commented, “I’ve grown up
fascinated with the potentiality of the concept of ‘reincarnation’ and
its logic. Our understandings of time, place, self, action, consequence,
and even identity can become imbued with other potentialities,
different from the ones we’ve inherited, the ones that currently
feel so restrictive.” What would the future look like if we were able
to—release? appease? rethink?—the ghosts of the past now rather
than leaving that job to clean up crews who might come after any
number of possible future catastrophes?
— Ksenya Gurshtein, Ulrich Museum Curator of Modern and
Contemporary Art
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Cast and crew of
The Boat People on
location in Bataan.
Photography:
Anspe Aquino.
Images courtesy
Tuan Andrew Nguyen.
Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, 2023. Brochure text may be reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license.
All images © of the artist.This brochure was designed by Eun Sil Kim, the Ulrich Museum’s Stev Overstreet Creative Communications Intern.
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