The Leavers

2014 – ongoing
Paintings, photographs, objects, performance

Begun in 2014, The Leavers has evolved from paintings into a sprawling project that also comprises photographs, vinyl records, turntable sculptures, and a theater performance.

Nguyen’s family left on the last boat to leave Vietnam at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. They immigrated to the United States and never spoke of it again. With these paintings, the artist asks of the viewer to mentally redraw the missing black lines, to give definition where time has erased. Employing oil pastels, a medium that never fully dries, The Leavers reiterates how memory is organic and ever shifting.

Sourced from old family photographs, the initial paintings depict coloring book images that have been filled in but with the black outlines removed, suggesting the skewed ways in which we remember and recall the past. The playful palette belies a narrative of displacement and uprooting.

PRESS: 
Art Asia Pacific
Hyperallergic

In 2017, for the California Pacific Triennial, The Leavers expanded into a group of photo-paintings that represent all the houses the artist’s family has ever lived in together, in Vietnam and the United States. Utilizing old family photographs of these houses, Nguyen went back to the same locations and re-photographed them from the same vantage points. From the old images the artist made small childlike paintings, again with the outlines removed. These were inlayed into the new corresponding photograph, printed large with rectangular openings cut away. “Home” is implied to be a time-strewn, murky dream, where past and present collapse into one another.

For the last two years Nguyen has embarked on creating a theatrical piece inspired by the same concept and story. Utilizing video footage of interviews the artist had collected of his family (for DONG, a documentary that was never made), The Leavers weaves a narrative of seemingly unconnected fragments, from personal archives and modern newsreels, to the aesthetics of Ted Talks, bodybuilding competitions, extremist protests, and old Renault car ads. The Leavers conflates personal narrative with sweeping societal conflicts, from the Vietnam diaspora to biophilia and MAGA.

In the process of creating the performance, which contains multiple moving parts that serve their own external purposes, Nguyen is collaborating with acclaimed Detroit-based musician Fred Thomas on the soundtrack.  Each song composed for The Leavers will be made into its own 12″ single vinyl record, accompanied by its own unique turntable sculpture. The first completed song is a rendition of the popular Vietnamese anthem “Sài Gòn”, whereby the refrain has been changed from the revered southern city to Vietnam’s modern northern capital Ha Noi. The artist’s parents were originally from the village of Ninh Binh, just outside Hanoi, then migrated to Saigon in 1954. Sung by vocalist Valerie Salerno, who doesn’t speak Vietnamese, this simple alteration confounds histories, suggesting how opposing ideologies might find utopian form through cultural appropriation and border-crossing music.