Book Launch: Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam by Minh Nguyen
With Catherine Quan Damman, Kaleem Hawa, Yasmina Price, and Mark Tseng-Putterman
Location
e-flux
172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
About the event
Join us at e-flux for a reading and conversation with Minh Nguyen on the occasion of her new book, Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam, released by Art Metropole and Wendy’s Subway. Nguyen will read and present from the chapter of the book on art and censorship, followed by remarks and a conversation with Catherine Quan Damman, Kaleem Hawa, Yasmina Price, and Mark Tseng-Putterman.
Free with RSVP
About the book
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 authoritarian 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.
Driven by a diasporic curiosity that seeks discovery over dwelling on loss, Memorial Park avoids nostalgic idealism or reflexive condemnation. Instead, Nguyen takes seriously the legacy of Vietnamese liberation by naming what it has become—and what it has not. What emerges is a complex picture of the country today and a reflection on how we inherit and reckon with radical histories that shape our world.
About the speakers
Minh Nguyen is a writer and curator based between New York City and Ho Chi Minh City. She is the curator of Dogma, a collection and gallery in HCMC focused on art and political graphics, and managing editor of e-flux journal. Her book Memorial Park is out with Wendy’s Subway and Art Metropole.
Catherine Quan Damman is an art historian and critic; she holds the Valeria Napoleone Linda Nochlin Professorship at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she is Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art. Her first book, Performance: A Deceptive History, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press in early 2027.
Kaleem Hawa is a writer and researcher living in New York. His book on the Palestinian captives' movement, Like a Bag Trying to Empty, was published by Wendy's Subway last year.
Yasmina Price is a New York–based writer and film programmer completing a PhD at Yale University. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent and diaspora, anti-colonial cinema, and the experimental practices of women artists. Her programming has been featured at Anthology Film Archives, Light Industry, Maysles Documentary Center, e-flux, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, Los Angeles; and The National Gallery of Art, D.C. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes and museum catalogues, with essays in The Nation, The Baffler, MUBI’s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, Criterion’s Current, Film Quarterly, and World Records Journal.
Mark Tseng-Putterman is a writer, historian, and educator based in New York City. His work focuses on how US empire has shaped the politics of Asian American belonging during the unfinished Cold War. His manuscript-in-progress, Cold War Diaspora, draws on several years of archival research and oral histories to trace how Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese American communities navigated the colliding projects of racial inclusion and diasporic nationalism during the 1950s–1980s. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Boston Review. He is co-editor of a new collection on contemporary Asian American grassroots activism, Asian America Rising, published in September by New York University Press, and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.