Teo Nguyen Is Painting Peace

At first glance, the photorealistic paintings of misty forests, fields of grass, and verdant farmland simply seem like sublime landscapes. But the black-and-white acrylic works on paper—some a monumental 6 by 8 feet, others as small as 6 by 8 inches—represent much more. As anchors to Viêt Nam Peace Project, Minneapolis artist Teo Nguyen’s solo exhibition that opened at the Minneapolis Institute of Art on July 30, they reference iconic but tragic news photographs taken during the war in Vietnam. (Two of the best-known works are by AP photographers: Nick Ut’s photo of children running from a napalm attack and Eddie Adams’s photo of the execution of Nguyen Van Lem, a suspected Viet Cong.)

“We look at these war images within these archival identities, but beyond these frames is what I really want to explore as an artist,” says Nguyen, who immigrated to the United States from Vietnam when he was 16. “There’s so much beyond these images that nobody talks about—especially the cultural and spiritual aspects of the Vietnamese people. Vietnam isn’t just a war. It’s a country and a people. I wanted to speak to the humanity of that.”

Nguyen accomplished that by removing the atrocities from the images. It’s an approach he carefully considered alongside his husband, Micah Tran, also a Vietnamese American.

“We’ve observed the media’s representation of us—telling our stories—that hasn’t been accurate, misrepresenting and misunderstanding who we are,” says Tran.

We’re talking over coffee at the couple’s hillside midcentury home in Golden Valley—also home to Nguyen’s smallest and most familiar studio (of three around town). Of course, our topic is heavy. The Vietnam War remains one of the most charged, painful, and controversial events of modern history. More than anything, though, the story Nguyen tells is one of peace as a practice—and art, along with memory, imagination, and empathy, is his instrument.

“I don’t want this project to be ‘us versus them’ or ‘the good guys versus the bad guys,’” he says. “That’s the way to continue creating conflict. That’s how we are able to pick up a gun and kill. Because if we don’t understand that other people are full of complexities like us, then it’s easy to kill.”

Born in Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, two years after the war ended, Nguyen never got to meet his grandparents or uncle—all killed in the war—and he grew up with bomb shelters in his backyard and the ever-present fear that war could return at any moment. He and his friends froze whenever they heard a helicopter overhead. And he’ll never forget his recurring nightmare.

“I can totally see it: This bomb is always, like, six inches above my head,” Nguyen says. “I had that dream for roughly four years straight—every single night, the same dream. I’m just running away from this bomb until I get super exhausted, and then I would wake up and think, Oh my God, that was a dream.”

But he also remembers rain falling on his home’s corrugated metal roof and the U.S.–issued military blanket that provided comfort and was cool on his skin. “It felt so nice laying under that blanket and listening to the rain.”

Viêt Nam Peace Project isn’t only a way for Nguyen to work through the experiences of Vietnam. It also carries his hope to create an awareness of the toll war takes.

“It’s really sad when we look at the war in Vietnam and how many ‘Vietnam Wars’ have happened after,” he says. “History is repeating itself. And it all stems from this intolerance of difference.”

Nguyen hopes the show also speaks to visitors about making peace a personal practice. And those actions can be simple.

“When you go out to vote or help someone or even when you just stop your car to let someone cross the street, it’s a peace practice,” he says.

A lot of how he and Tran see things stems from their values as animists who believe that all things have a spirit. They’re values imbued not only in Nguyen’s Vietnam landscapes but also in his Midwest landscapes, where the composition of scale and vantage—with the horizon line low, beneath a sweeping sky—alludes to an outsider like him absorbing the scene and human stories within the terrain.

“The serenity of it really speaks to me,” Nguyen says. “I don’t know how much of that has to do with my experience as someone who grew up in a war-torn country, but when I look at these farms, I’m always curious about what their lives are like. I think about Vietnam—I can’t help but think about it. So, I’m thinking about the other part of the world and what happened over there, and I’m thinking about my adopted homeland.”

Indeed, both countries play into Nguyen’s identity. After being sponsored by a brother living in California, he moved to San Jose, where he graduated from high school before eventually moving to Orange County, where he met Tran. Landing in Minnesota (for going on 17 years now!), however, was never supposed to be part of the plan. “To be honest, we were on our way east—we only planned to stay here for five years,” Tran says. Nguyen nods. “But we have put down our roots here, with our dear friends, now our family,” he adds.

FRESH PERSPECTIVE

Even driving through Nebraska and Iowa on his way to Minnesota, Nguyen was taken with the vastness.

“There was something about it,” he says. “I wanted to make these really large, vast skies and keep the landscape down in that horizontal.”

Despite artistic skill that goes back to drawing as a kid—and that was honed for a time, while in his 20s, in art school—it’s been less than 10 years since Nguyen began making a living as an artist.

“When I applied to museums or I applied to galleries, I got rejected every single time,” he says. “That dream had sort of died for me. I hoped that maybe one day, when I died, somebody would get ahold of my collection and do something good with it.”

But “something good” happened so much sooner. Minneapolis interior designer Martha Dayton, a friend, recognized Nguyen’s talent.

“She was always saying, ‘You need to show your work; you need to share these with other people,’” he says. “I finally said, ‘If you want to do it, you do it.’”

And she did. She told her uncle Ralph Burnet of the Burnet Gallery, now Burnet Fine Art and Advisory. He and the gallery director, Jennifer Phelps, made an appointment to stop by Nguyen’s home studio.

“I hardly had room to paint in there, but Ralph and Jennifer came by, looked at everything, and said, ‘We’ll give you a show,’” Nguyen recounts.

And he remembers the exact date of the opening: July 9, 2014—just three days after he and Tran were married. Thirty-eight of his paintings were hung in the former Burnet Gallery at the Chambers Hotel in downtown Minneapolis.

“They sold them all, literally, on the first night,” he says of the surreal moment. “I walked around the gallery and kept saying, ‘Oh my God, this is so weird, this is so weird.’ You know the courtyard of the Chambers Hotel? I went out there and I cried. I couldn’t believe it.”

Nobody had ever loved his art enough to spend money to buy it, he says. And now Burnet and Phelps—suddenly with no more of Nguyen’s work to sell—were asking him if he had anything else.

“I went through my studio and pulled out 13 other paintings, and just like that, they sold,” he says.

The immense interest in Nguyen’s work stemmed partly from the fact that its photorealistic quality took people by surprise.

“Ralph and Jennifer would say, ‘Yeah, these are paintings,’ and people were like, ‘What? These aren’t photographs?’” he says. “Sometimes, I think from afar, people think they are photographs.”

Photorealism isn’t Nguyen’s only artistic style. He’s also found success with his abstracts.

“People get a little bit—not confused—but it’s sort of like, ‘How do you move from abstraction to photorealism?’” he says. “For me, it’s like speaking multiple languages. Do I want to speak one language or multiple languages? I would like to speak multiple languages.”

Since those and subsequent successes, Nguyen has added onto the studio space at his home in Golden Valley and brought on two additional off-site studios for large-scale work, including 16,000 square feet by Sociable Cider Werks in Northeast Minneapolis. He even has a space he uses as a showroom near the Guthrie Theater. And he’s not done yet.

“I’m hoping that at some point, this will give me enough means to open a really kick-ass gallery,” he says. “It’s one of my dreams.”

A DREAM REALIZED

But today, his dream is taking shape at Mia, where those dramatic landscapes are joined by other works of Nguyen’s art celebrating  Vietnam’s culture and people and memorializing the lives of those who were lost. One of those works is a 15-minute film he directed, inspired by poems written by his 88-year-old mother. Displaced from her village in central Vietnam for 57 years between the French, Japanese, and American wars, she gradually moved farther and farther south.

“She just gives me so much hope, because if something like that happened to me, I don’t know whether I’d be able to have that positive outlook on life,” Nguyen says.

The film does not center on the war but rather on the memories of a place his mom holds dear.

“The beauty of this story about my mom is she doesn’t define her life by her war-related experience,” he says. “Yes, the film is about her poems and her displacement experience, but also about everything she cherished and held near her heart along the way.”

Another gallery will be devoted to an installation of 61 stacks of paper on the gallery floor, measuring 90 inches by 90 inches. One stack reads “58,220” to memorialize the lives of American servicemen and servicewomen. The others 60 stacks will be blank.

“We have records of every American who was sent to Vietnam and who died in the war, but we don’t have records of the Vietnamese,” Nguyen says. “There’s an estimate that six million Vietnamese died in this war, but they are nameless.”

Around the corner in the stairwell just off the Target Wing atrium, a photography installation will hang. It will act as a sculpture and draws attention to devastation brought on by the defoliant Agent Orange.

“There are parts of Vietnam that have the highest cancer rates in the world, and nobody really knows that,” Nguyen says. “If you look at Agent Orange images, you see all the trees completely stripped of everything.” So, he took those images, blew them up to a very abstract form, and printed them on 700 clear film strips, “sort of like branches,” he says. “It talks about the invisibility of the toxin but how it’s still raging on and affecting people.”

The final gallery will focus on the lotus, the national flower of Vietnam and a symbol of optimism. Nguyen’s paintings on 10 paper panels create a lotus pond 11 by 50 feet in size that serves, in many respects, as another tribute to his mom.

“She’s like this lotus that has grown out of the mud,” he says. “After years of displacements and witnessing the horrors of many wars, she’s still finding beauty in everything.”

And that’s fitting for the final gallery of the show.

“It seemed to me,” Nguyen says, “that the end message should be an optimistic sense of moving beyond—even though it’s imprinted in the land—and coming together and celebrating our humanity.” 

Viêt Nam Peace Project, Mia, July 30, 2022–June 18, 2023, 2400 3rd Ave. S., Mpls.