Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Boat People is a fable composed through surprising juxtapositions. The bodies navigating the open seas in a whimsical yellow boat are five scrawny children. They wade ashore a deserted, sun dappled island, wearing marvellous steampunk headdresses. The tallest of them, a long-haired girl, with a spear in hand, leads her charge in their inland wandering into the tropical thicket accompanied by a strange, lively, syncopated soundtrack. There is no one else in this place but the children. Yet objects meet them, many objects. Lichen covered reproductions of ancient stupas, headless Buddha statues, a Guan Yin statue, Christian figures, dates carved into stones, 1980, January 1988, ‘made by Lao refugees,’ marble plaques engraved with names, an empty museum displaying old photos and guns. It is the end of the world. Yet here they are, five children, figures whose movement, navigating, seeking, unleashing, endows Nguyen’s video with its infectious pulse and rhythmic sense of life, despite the end of time.

The children inhabit the island and occupy themselves with carving wooden replica objects, a gun, a lotus plant on a plinth, which they burn. One day on the beach the girl encounters a severed head, which alternately takes on the appearance of a static wooden carved statue representing the head of some kind of deity, and an animate, talking head of a…female? goddess? ghost? A conversation takes place.

Born in Saigon, raised in the US, and resident of Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen’s latest video The Boat People was produced in collaboration with Belles Artes Projects in Bataan, Philippines, and recently shown as part of his solo exhibition “A Lotus in a Sea of Fire” at James Cohan gallery in New York. The work extends the artist’s exploration of storytelling, memory practice and the potency of replica objects.

May Adadol Ingawanij: The time of the story is the time of extinction and a time of becoming. I found this incongruous juxtaposition very striking in The Boat People. It’s quite difficult to shake off the habit of thought, shaped by the disaster movie genre, that turns warnings about the prospect of human extinction into an image of a spectacular event. The figures of the children wandering, gathering, making replicas and burning them give us another way to imagine the duration of extinction, as still, and yet, the duration of life. The little girl is the figure of the world maker, somehow. She’s not quite like the last girl remaining at the end of horror movies, the survivor, who’s just that. She wanders, gathers, cares for, talks to a stranger!, makes and burns. She’s fearless, resourceful and feisty and in this she reminds me of unstoppable little Mei in Ghibli Studio’s My Neighbour Totoro.

That incongruously generative energy in the story time of extinction comes from the gestures and movement of the children and those wonderful tableaux in the video, but also the very striking percussion music, a syncopated pulse, sometimes irregular, which sounds at once futuristic and very old.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen: Definitely, the little girl is the figure of the world maker indeed. She is not merely a survivor, but a creator—the bridge between the past and the future, the space between two worlds. She exists inside this liminality as she holds the potential to create the new world. I believe that the time of extinction is the time of becoming, and she becomes a goddess-like figure as she pieces humanity back into “something” through her curiosity, imagination and compassion.

I have to say that the music was such a serendipitous discovery. The soundtrack, the pulse of the film is by Gamelan Salukat, an amazing gamelan band led by Dewa Alit. I heard them for the first time, live, at the first Architectural Triennial in Sharjah in November 2019. I had already started to roughly assemble the edit for the film, and when I heard Gamelan Salukat, their mixing of traditional Balinese gamelan with sounds that hinged on experimental electronica, I knew that was the missing link between sound and image that I didn’t even know I was looking for. The syncopated rhythms also hark to the pounding of the chisel as could be seen when the children are carving wooden objects to the sounds of Gamelan Salukat. This is one of many scenes where the music becomes a character in itself. I found myself liking very much the idea that this film was a collaboration between Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia.

MAI: How did this project come about, and how was it shaped or changed by the location of Bataan, both as a historical landing site for Vietnamese refugees and also now the location of Las Casas Filipinas de Azucar, itself a grand replica initiative?

TAN: The film was inspired by and designed as a kind of letter to Bataan, to the history of Bataan from the future of the world. I spent about a week at Bellas Artes in 2018 where I got a chance to visit all the museums and the various historical sites. The coasts of Southeast Asia are such remarkable places ridden with histories of migrations and traumas. I remembered returning to Saigon quite baffled about the ways that one can genuinely approach a site like Bataan and all of its histories of trauma. I kept thinking about the living quarters of the refugees that were kept and displayed in the museum at the Philippines Refugee Processing Center, and I kept seeing their ghosts occupying those spaces. It was a recurring image that informed the rest of the film. “Our ghosts are of the future,” a character from another film, shot on Pulau Bidong, reminds me of it.

I came back to Bataan in the summer of 2019 to produce a project and a few days in, monsoon season hit, forcing me, or rather, allowing me to stay inside my room for several days. I thought I’d just write something even though it seemed like an exercise in futility. Based on some of these recurring images that would find their place in my mind over the years, I ended up writing the film’s script while waiting for the monsoon to ease, all the while unsure of whether we’d be able to produce anything at all. Fortunately, the weather let up and things fell into place quite quickly, not to mention the amazing team at Bellas Artes, who were able to make things happen within a short time.

Several scenes of the film were shot at Las Casas. The resort’s many, many surprising angles, nooks and crannies allowed me to take the story to places outside of the tropical setting of Bataan. Las Casas itself is an interesting place—a collection of historic Filipino houses, taken apart brick by brick from different parts of the Philippines and reassembled in Bataan in the same painstaking way they were taken apart—another form of museology, a collection of objects (in this case houses) saturated with historical narratives.

MAI: The replica is a recurring feature in your works and in some of the works realised as part of your practice with The Propeller Group. The real-fake opposition becomes irrelevant as the question shifts to the efficacy or the liveliness of the replica. The head on the beach is a replica and a deity-being of sorts. Her institutional religious provenance is unclear. She looks a bit like the Guan Yin, or could she be the head lopped off from one of the Buddha replicas (a female Buddha?!) With this sense of indeterminacy, this being and object would seem to be an animistic figure. The conversation between the girl and the deity is the heart of the video. Here, I’m reminded of the insight proposed in a recent book called Animism in Southeast Asia (Kaj Århem & Guido Sprenger), that shifts the emphasis away from the idea that animism is about belief in objects having life. Rather, the emphasis becomes to think about animism as a non-systematic and hierarchical practice of human-spirit communication. Vulnerable humans address spirits as a praxis of being, relating, affecting, and place making in precarity.

The significance of this head on the beach, as a kind of animistic being/object, isn’t then just as an object with a life “in it.” It’s the sociality between the girl and the deity-object that suggests transformative possibilities, still, yet. A portrayal that’s animistic in this more specific sense of a communicative praxis.

The closing moments of The Boat People are very beautiful and moving as an opening from a conversation. The girl does pick up and carry the deity-object after all, and sets fire to her, a gesture of connecting, assisting, and releasing. In that permitting of assistance and releasing we hope the deity-object transmits a life force to help the children along in their wandering world-making at the end of the world.

TAN: I am fascinated with our need to preserve some objects and destroy others. I am fascinated with our need to make objects and to make objects of objects. On one hand, I think of replicas as a kind of “reincarnation”. On the other hand, I have to insist that replicas don’t exist. Each subsequent “replica” performs differently, hence, I think that these things we call “replicas” are actually very different from the “original”. I think of them as different incarnations of the same desire to understand the world at various moments of rupture, i.e. pandemics, war, environmental disasters, etc., in ways very similar to how you speak about “humans addressing spirits as a praxis of being, relating… in precarity.”

The children in the film are confronted by a multitude of objects, which publicly memorialize and remember—some are museum objects that have been re-presented to create some nebulous image of humanity, even functional objects that have survived time that are then imbued with meaning. Their main trajectory is to find and engage the deteriorating relics of humanity to try to communicate somehow with the hidden specter of humanity’s ghosts.

I think about the idea of a “testimonial object” as offered by Marianne Hirsch and the ability of objects to contain “narrative” and hence to resist political erasure. I think of Vietnamese Supernaturalisms as a subversive system of political resistance as explained by Thien Do in his book with the same title. I think about all the ghosts stories from refugee camps I heard as a child.

The little girl’s compassion for the world, which extends to a compassion even for “objects”, leads her to “liberate” the severed statue head (against the statue head’s wishes of a physical liberation, a freedom of movement). There’s an insinuation in the dialogue that this act is possibly a reflection of how she had to care for her mother’s body and her mother’s memory. Vietnam’s recent history is a collision between political and spiritual liberations. I think about the self-immolation of the buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc. I think of traditions in Vietnam like burning votive objects to send to the spirits. Offerings of fruit and flowers on the altar of ancestors. I think of the different ways that burning is used ritualistically in Southeast Asia. A burning fueled by compassion and not destruction.

The film Statues Also Die by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais raised an interesting question about how objects lose their cultural and spiritual essence within the process of pillaging and collecting that the colonial project enacted. If Marker and Resnais are suggesting that objects could “die”, their intent and meaning made to be devoid, then maybe the little girl in the film is suggesting that objects could be brought back to life. And she does not falter in doing so. Maybe this is the communicative praxis you speak of.

MAI: Watching The Boat People, and also another work of yours, the two-channel installation My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires, I wondered whether you might have a take on what becomes of the idea of reincarnation in the age of extinction.

TAN: I love this question. When I was six, I remember having my mind blown away when my grandmother and subsequently my father tried to explain the concept of “reincarnation” to me. That moment was a complete “Matrix” moment and since then I’ve grown up fascinated with the potentiality of the concept of “reincarnation” and its logic. Our understandings of time, place, self, action, consequence, and even identity can become imbued with other potentialities, different from the ones we’ve inherited, the ones that currently feel so restrictive.

At the same time, as we’re being confronted with multiple species extinctions, including our own, these same notions of time, place, self, action, consequence and identity also become expanded realities to be re-examined on a wider perspective and communally.

Maybe the ideas of reincarnation and extinction are not opposites but are the same ideas of death and transformation taking different forms at different scales. I think they both have the ability to guide us to an understanding of empathy and compassion, two concepts I hold on to strongly.

MAI: In memory studies in the past few decades there’s an established paradigm linking objects, memories and trauma, with an emphasis on bearing witness as expressive logic and a logic of spectator address. With your work, the energy and the sound-image choreography that give such a sense of animation, of becoming, what’s intriguing to me is this channelling of an interest in the power of objects towards transmission as transformation. What does this imply in terms of addressing. I’m not asked to witness, I’m faced with an energy and process of making, change, possible reincarnation. And reincarnation not so much as personal/individual transformation.