Empowering the slippage between domination and usurpation of public space and popular symbol or stereotype, Tuan Andrew Nguyen's conceptual art practice provokes the cultural mind-set of contemporary Vietnam.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in Sai Gon, Vietnam in 1976 and currently lives and works in Sai Gon, Vietnam. He graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received his Masters of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004.
He is a co-founder and currently board member of Sàn Art, an artist-initiated exhibition space and educational program in Sai Gon, Vietnam. Tuan has shown in numerous film festivals, internationl exhibitions, having works in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Carre d'Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum. Tuan has received several awards in both film and arts, including an Art Matters grant in 2010.
In his continual attempts at reworking the power dynamics of public space and mass media in general, he founded The Propeller Group in 2006, an art collective who positions themselves between a fake advertising company and archeologists of hidden historical conundrums. Accolades for the collective include the main prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurztfilmtage Wintherthur and a Creative Capital award for their video project Television Commercial for Communism .
The collective has been featured in numerous international exhibitions including the The Ungovernables (2012 New Museum Triennial), Made In LA (2012 Los Angeles Biennial), Propsect 3 (New Orleans Triennial 2014), and the Venice Biennale 2015. In 2017, My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires was presented at the Armory Show New York 2017 and The Irony of Worship at the Whitney Biennial New York 2017.