When Water Embraces Empty Space is a new film-based project by Vietnamese-American artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, the artist’s first solo exhibition in London.

Nugyễn’s practice explores how storytelling can promote healing, working with communities from different regions of the world that suffer from colonial trauma as a consequence of land and culture loss, wars and displacement.

When Water Embraces Empty Space focuses on the Luf Boat, an exquisitely hand-carved fifteen-metre-long, wooden outrigger sailboat, from the island of Luf in Papua New Guinea. The boat’s provenance has been the subject of much debate in recent years. Taken from the island’s inhabitants following a genocidal attack and brought to Berlin by German traders in 1903, the Luf Boat now resides in the ethnological collection of the Humboldt Forum. With the loss of the last boat of its type and the craftsmanship preserved within it, the islanders also lost the knowledge of how to build these large vessels.

Working with the descendants of the Luf Boat’s original builders, Nguyễn seeks to fulfil their expressed wish to reconnect with the boat and mourn their community’s loss, by proposing a novel approach to restitution and reparation enacted through knowledge-sharing.

Nguyễn processes historical material and contemporary experience to create a series of films combining documentation of this special encounter with the Luf Boat, CGI animation and speculative imaginings. In the gallery space, these works will be presented alongside photographs and sculptural elements produced in collaboration with the Luf Island boat builders’ descendants. This new body of work by the artist aspires to reunite people and their material culture, to heal the gap between makers and keepers, and between trauma and healing. For Nguyễn the boat acts as a ‘bridge between the past and the future, between the dominant narrative of German colonialism and the erased stories of the people of Papua New Guinea.’

About the artist


Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn’s practice explores the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Nguyễn investigates the erasures that colonialism has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. Through this collaborative practice, he explores memory as a form of resistance and empowerment, emphasizing the power of storytelling as a means for healing, empathy and solidarity.

Nguyễn has received several awards in both film and visual arts, including an Art Matters grant in 2010 and a VIA Art Fund grant. He won the Joan Miró Foundation award in 2023. His work has been included in several international exhibitions including the Asia Pacific Triennial 2006, the Whitney Biennial 2017, the Sharjah Biennial 2019 and Berlin Biennale 2022. Recent one-person exhibitions include The New Museum, NY, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, CPT.


Nguyễn co-founded The Propeller Group in 2006, a platform for collectivity that situates itself between an art collective and an advertising company. Awards include the grand prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur for the film The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music and a Creative Capital award for their video project Television Commercial for Communism. Besides a major travelling retrospective that began at the MCA Chicago, the collective has participated in international exhibitions including The Ungovernables (2012 New Museum Triennial), the 2012, LA Biennial, Prospect3 (2014 New Orleans Triennial), and the Venice Biennale 2015.