Fifty Years Later: Art, Ecocide and Animatedness in Vietnam | CU Experts

Abstract: Fifty years after the end of the Second Indochina War, Tuần Andrew Nguyễn’s two-screen video , The Sounds of Cannons Familiar Like Sad Refrains (Đại Bác Nghe Quen Như Câu Dạo Buồn , 2021) juxtaposes U.S. military footage in Vietnam with contemporary documentation of Vietnamese agents unearthing and reburying an unexploded bomb for a controlled detonation in the highlands. I argue that the artwork combines wartime imagery with emotionally charged voiceover, sound and music to give its protagonist—the unexploded ordnance—a “proper burial” after 50 years, situating it within the animist-Buddhist ecological life surrounding it in the rainforest. I conclude by connecting the video to the 2016 fish ecocide of the Formosa disaster and Hoàng Ngọc Tú’s artistic protest of 6,000 face masks printed with images of fish for demonstrators to wear. Both artworks doubt the singular power of atrocity images to spur on political action, offering instead alternative possibilities for public animatedness against socio-environmental violence .

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