Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Norr Cohan is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, on view from October 30 through December 19, 2026, at the gallery’s 48 and 52 Walker Street locations.

For the artist’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, Nguyen brings together his expansive film oeuvre with his long-standing sculptural practice of transforming material remnants of war into objects of healing. Visitors first encounter a suspended kinetic installation of mobiles miming the forest from which the material was sourced. Each work is forged from reclaimed 57mm artillery shells from the Quảng Trị province of central Vietnam. With each mobile carefully tuned to a resonant frequency, the installation echoes both the movement of the forest and the unseen forces that continue to shape the landscape. Their tones carry across the physical environment of the gallery as a call to remember and reflect.

Beyond the forest of suspended mobiles, a gallery is dedicated to Tiger Mountain, 2026, a monumental sculpture whose arches evoke the rugged mountain peaks of Quảng Trị, just south of the former Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). During the Vietnam War, U.S. Marines used peaks such as Tiger Tooth Mountain (Động Voi Mẹp) as military outposts. Long before receiving these military designations, the dense jungles were home to wild tigers, revered as ‘Chúa Sơn Lâm’ (Lord of the Forest), guardians of the mountain.

Rising more than 3.5 meters high, Tiger Mountain, 2026, reaches back to that historic reading of the landscape, uniting both its political and cultural histories. Suspended from its arches are three demined bomb casings, polished to a mirror finish, and transformed in collaboration with sound healers into resonant bells tuned to the 432 Hz frequency. From Tiger Tooth, 2026, hangs a single bell, its title directly referencing the outpost the Marines called Tiger Tooth Mountain. Together, the two works recast military terrain as sacred ground, restoring the tiger, the mountain’s guardian, to a landscape patinated by conflict.

Beyond Tiger Mountain, visitors encounter Fire Tops, 2026, a celestial wall-mounted tondo composed of more than 3,000 small discs, rolled and pounded from repurposed artillery shell casings. Its glistening surface recalls the scaled armor of a dragon. Nguyen manipulates oxidation and patina with a painter’s hand, drawing out rich tones of turquoise and umber punctuated by flashes of fluorescent safety orange. By accelerating the patina process, he gives the brass a painterly depth that evokes the passage of time and the residue it leaves behind.

At the heart of the exhibition is the premiere of Sacred Forest / Rừng Thiêng, 2026, a new film shot in Nguyen's signature lyrical style. Set in Đakrông, a mountainous region of Quảng Trị where the legacies of war remain embedded in the land and Indigenous spiritual beliefs still shape the relationship between humans and the natural world, the film is cast with members of the Bru-Vân Kiều community. It follows Khuyên, an eight-year-old girl whose parents risk their lives clearing unexploded bombs (UXOs), from the forest. Suspended in a dreamlike realm between life and death, Khuyên is guided by a spirit in the form of the saola, the critically endangered “Asian unicorn,” into a world where the boundaries between human and animal, living and dead, memory and myth begin to dissolve. Music is the film's guiding thread and is performed on traditional handmade instruments by a Bru-Vân Kiều ensemble. Recorded on location, the songs form a dialogue between people and the forest, which emerges not as a backdrop to human history but as a living world with its own memory and agency.

The film’s guardian spirit takes physical form as a marble head of the saola, its horns forged from brass UXOs. Alongside it, a group of river stones carries the film’s landscape into the gallery. 

Together, film and sculpture form a single immersive environment in which objects, landscapes, and communities become vessels for histories that might otherwise disappear. In Sacred Forest, Nguyen  proposes that remembrance can be a way of listening for what remains: in the ground beneath our feet, in songs passed between generations, and in beings whose disappearance we have scarcely begun to comprehend. To find our way home may not be to restore what once was, but to learn again how to live in relation to all that remains.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Saigon and emigrated with his family to the United States in 1979. He received a BFA from the University of California, Irvine, in 1999 and an MFA from CalArts in 2004, and in 2004 returned to Vietnam, where he lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. He is a founding member of The Propeller Group and a co-founder of Sàn Art. Nguyen has had major solo presentations at the New Museum (2023), Fundació Joan Miró (2024), Zeitz MOCAA (2024), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2024), and the Art Institute of Chicago (2025), with work included in the Whitney Biennial (2017), the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022), Manifesta 13 (2020), and the 61st Venice Biennale (2026). He is the recipient of the 2023 Joan Miró Prize and a 2025 MacArthur Fellowship. In 2025, Nguyen unveiled two major public commissions—Temple at the National Gallery Singapore and Naga at the Princeton University Art Museum—followed by The Light That Shines Through the Universe, his High Line Plinth commission, on view through Spring 2027. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Singapore Art Museum, among many others.