BIO
2023

Curatorial Work

2022

"i can’t swim." is a new body of work created by Van Tran Nguyen, a multimedia artist based in Baltimore, MD. Her work is a response to the memory of the American War in Vietnam. She looks closely at public spaces of grief like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s War Memorial (1982) and interrogates her own Vietnamese American identity, which is still defined by the war. In a series of looping videos and installations, Tran Nguyen depicts how trauma, retold, leads to passages of folklore. What happens when the instruction manual, on how to survive, gets lost in the trans-generational gap? What will we make of ourselves and what does it look like to search for purpose within our identities?

"i can’t swim." is a new body of work created by Van Tran Nguyen, a multimedia artist based in Baltimore, MD. Her work is a response to the memory of the American War in Vietnam. She looks closely at public spaces of grief like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s War Memorial (1982) and interrogates her own Vietnamese American identity, which is still defined by the war. In a series of looping videos and installations, Tran Nguyen depicts how trauma, retold, leads to passages of folklore. What happens when the instruction manual, on how to survive, gets lost in the trans-generational gap? What will we make of ourselves and what does it look like to search for purpose within our identities?

i can't swim.

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