Tuan Andrew Nguyen has won the 2023 Joan Miró Prize. The Vietnamese-American will receive €50,000 and a solo show at the Barcelona institution in 2024.
The artist’s family emigrated to the U.S. as refugees in 1979 when he was aged three, and stories relating to collective memory, colonisation and displacement proliferate in his video and sculpture work. For the four-channel video work The Specters of Ancestors Becoming (2019), Nguyen profiled members of Vietnamese diaspora in Senegal, whose presence in the West African country is linked to the local soldiers sent by the French colonial administration to fight Vietnamese liberation in the 1940s. In The Island (2017) and The Boat People (2020) the artist returned to the sites of former Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugee camps.
Nguyen won over a shortlist of Tala Madani, Frida Orupabo, Mika Rottenberg and Haegue Yang. In their announcement of the award, the jury of the 2023 Joan Miró Prize said: ‘as a person who has lived the experience of migration firsthand, the authenticity of Nguyen’s output has the rare ability to touch both our minds and hearts.’
The winners of previous Joan Miró Prizes ares Olafur Eliasson (2007), Pipilotti Rist (2009), Mona Hatoum (2011), Roni Horn (2013), Ignasi Aballí (2015), Kader Attia (2017) and Nalini Malani (2019)
