Tuan the Sculptor

The other night, my fiance and I were strolling around the gaslamp district and came across this little gallery. The only reason why it stood out so much was because it was lit up like Tokyo at midnight, their electricity bill must be ridiculous.

We went in there not b/c of the art, but b/c we were cold and didn't look homeless. The place was as big as my kitchen and hosted maybe 4 artists in there. Tuan Nguyen was one of them. After pretending to look interested in the paintings for about 10 minutes, the curator told us his story and, whether she was accurate or not, it stuck with us the rest of the night.

I googled him, didn't come up with much but this stuff on wikipedia. The art gallery lady explained that he was born a prince in Vietnam, had all the best instructors and access to everything - including art teachers (which was not taught in Vietnam schools at the time). Then something happened (think this is where the communist conflict comes in) and his family was stripped of everything and he was locked up. Didn't have much to do, ended up making sculptures out of the clay at the prison. Whatever a Vietnamese warden would be called, that person commissioned Tuan (what he goes by, first name only) to do some pieces for his family. From there, he ended up getting released (or maybe he tried to escape? not sure). Some other people tried to leave with him and they were killed. Somewhere in this story he met a woman and fell in love etc etc she was killed and he's never taken on to someone the same way again. Now, after all this stuff with prison and escaping, he was in the Philippines and trying to get to the states but couldn't for whatever reason, but his father had been given a whole bunch of teeth from I believe villagers who wanted to show their appreciation or something... sorry I'm kinda fuzzy on that part of the story. Anyway, Tuan's father didn't have anything to give him so he gave him these teeth and this was what Tuan provided to the immigration people as some type of collateral to get him passage to the U.S. Turns out the teeth belonged to Vietnamese and American soldiers who fought during the Vietnam war and being able to ID the owners would allow those families to have some closure. So he exchanged the teeth for allowance into America and he is said to attribute his current freedom and life in America to the American soldiers who died.

The gallery director told us this story, so contact the gallery if you wanna know what she told us exactly: their website http://www.ecgallery.com/


I don't know how accurate what we were told was, u'd really have to ask Tuan to know. There's been some talk about putting his life into a movie, but he wasn't too keen on it. They're at it again, and with this story being so movie worthy because and only because of the message of triumph, hope, and luck in it: I hope they go forward with it this time. Even if this isn't even close to his actual story, just thinking that a man can go from having the world to losing everything to still becoming one of the most revered living master artists of this time... then I would be doing his drive injustice by not accomplishing my own dreams. It's possible, through everything and everything, anything is possible.