Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Ballad of the Bomb

It begins with an explosion that judders the floor and resounds in your bones. Following that starting gun, the left channel of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s “The Sounds of Cannons, Familiar Like Sad Refrains / Đại Bác Nghe Quen Như Câu Dạo Buồn” (2021) plays archival footage glorifying American military might. The soundtrack alternates between victorious horns and a masculine voice with a Transatlantic accent boasting of the USS Bainbridge, the world’s first nuclear-power-guided missile frigate. Whereas the video on the left is composed of quick, grainy, spliced-together clips in military shades of blue and gray, the one on the right is slow-roving, its almost uncannily crisp camera following a squad of workers as they carefully maneuver a bomb out of the russet earth within the lush greenery of the Vietnamese province of Quảng Trị.

The United States’s bombing of Vietnam during the two decades of the Vietnam War (called the “American War” there, for obvious reasons) constitutes the largest aerial bombardment in history. Tons — literally — of unexploded ordnance (UXO) still stud the landscape. In many of his films, Nguyen interviews Vietnamese war survivors, building a scaffold of human memory. But when people are dehumanized — an essential first front of war, fought right at home, in the theater of the psyche — humanizing an object might, paradoxically, kindle empathy. Accordingly, the “protagonist” of this film is that very unexploded bomb in the right channel, musing in a booming, bass voice. 

With this UXO’s unburial comes, for lack of a better term, a trauma dump. He’s a shadow of himself, he complains, after having been abandoned here for decades. His indoctrinated hatred toward the Vietnamese is bitter but vague, and falls apart with any prodding. “They’ve dug me a grave,” he says at some point of the bomb squad, with something like gratitude. “Gave me a proper burial.” His existence will likely stoke a deep sense of pathos in the viewer: Absurdly, and poignantly, here is a missile experiencing imposter syndrome. He tells us that 10% of those bombs dropped did not explode. Was this on purpose, the silent protest of American soldiers opposed to the war, “Or am I just a failure?” If you think about it, he was drafted into the war like so many — even worse, he was created for it.

In the two rooms bookending the video installation are two Calder-esque sculptures wrought from metal bomb casings and artillery shells, one hanging from the ceiling and the other rooted to the floor. If they could speak, I wonder how they would feel about transitioning from an unwilling mercenary of war to a sleek object of contemporary art, tinkling gently with the opening and closing of gallery doors. I wonder if they would laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of being returned to their homeland for this new purpose. I wonder what they would think of their younger “brothers and sisters,” as the UXO in the film put it, wielded in endless wars all around the world, to which they are in mute, inert kinship. 

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Lullaby of Cannons for the Night continues at James Cohan gallery (291 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through March 22. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.