Minh Nguyen will write a series of essays considering communitarian art across Asia since the 1990s alongside communist histories within the region and internationally. Focusing on Vietnam and China (where communism manifested into political reality) and Indonesia (where the PKI was once the largest nonruling communist party in the world), these essays will examine how local artists are dealing with Red legacies that are at once alive and nebulous. Defining “communitarian” to refer to practices that comprise collective working modes, educational programs, and public participation, Nguyen will write about artists who revisit the aesthetic concerns of official revolutionary art and those who root their communal ethos in indigenous, ecological, labor, and religious movements. Through these writings, Nguyen hopes to illuminate the convergences of avant-garde art, social organization, and radical politics.
Born in Saigon and based in New York City, Minh Nguyen is a writer and organizer of exhibitions and programs. Her writing has appeared in publications including ArtAsiaPacific, Art in America, frieze, Momus, and Pioneer Works Broadcast, where she works as an editor. She has curated exhibitions and programs at Wing Luke Museum in Seattle; the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago; and at the Chicago Cultural Center, specifically what flies but never lands? (2021). Nguyen has taught at Parsons School of Design, The New School. In 2021–22 she was a participant in the “Art Schools of Asia” seminar organized by Asia Art Archive and the Getty Research Institute and an arts writer in residence at Fogo Island Arts and Artscape Gibraltar Point. Currently a visiting scholar at New York University, she is working on a forthcoming book with Art Metropole.