Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam by Minh Nguyen

Fifty years after the Fall of Saigon and twenty years after her family’s emigration to America, Minh Nguyen returns to her native Vietnam to find out what’s left of the old revolutionary project. In Memorial Park, a collection of essays pairing travelogue and criticism, Nguyen encounters relics of proletarian romance and vestiges of totalitarian control amid an evermore corporatized society. Along the way, she considers how contemporary artspeak confuses state censors, the rise of luxury “Smart Cities” as they supplant socialist housing complexes, and the enduring appeal of propaganda signs that once promised utopia. Her investigations reveal a nation at odds with its past, caught between preserving its socialist legacy and embracing capitalist transformation.

Driven by a diasporic curiosity that seeks discovery over dwelling on loss, Memorial Park refuses nostalgic idealism or reflexive condemnation. Instead, Nguyen takes seriously the legacy of Vietnamese liberation by naming what it has become—and what it decidedly is not. The result is a nuanced portrait of contemporary Vietnam and a meditation on how we inherit, understand, and ultimately reckon with radical histories that shaped our world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Minh Nguyen is a writer and curator based between New York City and Ho Chi Minh City. Her criticism on art and cinema has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, e-flux, Momus, Mousse, frieze, and ArtAsiaPacific, among other publications. She is the curator of Dogma, a collection and gallery in Ho Chi Minh City focused on art and political graphics. She is also managing editor of e-flux journal.

Raised in Seattle, Nguyen has curated exhibitions and programs at Wing Luke Museum, Northwest Film Forum, and King Street Station, and in Chicago, at Gene Siskel Film Center and Chicago Cultural Center. A former instructor at Parsons–The New School, she has received a Warhol Arts Writers grant, Fogo Island Arts Writing Award, and New York University’s Asia/Pacific/America Institute Visiting Scholar fellowship.