Tuan Andrew Nguyen was born in 1976 in Saigon. In 1979, he and his family emigrated as refugees to the United States. Nguyen graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received his Masters of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He currently lives and works between Ho Chi Minh City & Los Angeles.
Nguyen has had major solo presentations at the New Museum, New York, NY (2023); Fondació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain (2024); Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2024); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. (2024); and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2025). Nguyen debuted a new video work in the The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – In Minor Keys by Koyo Kouoh. Nguyen has received numerous awards, including the 2023 Joan Miró Prize, 2025 Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant, and 2025 MacArthur Fellowship. Nguyen unveiled two major commissions in late October 2025: Temple, at the National Gallery Singapore as part of the 2025 Singapore Biennale, and Naga, at the Princeton University Art Museum, coinciding with the opening of the museum’s new building. In April 2026, Nguyen unveiled his High Line Plinth commission, The Light That Shines Through the Universe, a 27-foot tall Buddha sculpture paying homage to the 6th-century Bamiyan Buddhas of central Afghanistan.
His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Carre d’Art - Musee d’art contemporain de Nimes, France; Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), Paris, France; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu, HI; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, Australia; Singapore Art Museum, Singapore; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Taguchi Art Collection, Japan; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among many others.
