James Cohan in New York has opened Sacred Forest / Rừng Thiêng, a solo exhibition by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, running from 30 October to 19 December 2026. The show premieres a new film by the artist, presented alongside sculptures assembled from remnants of war.

Nguyen's work returns repeatedly to the material and human aftermath of conflict in Vietnam, using found and salvaged matter as the basis for sculpture. In this exhibition the sculptures carry that history directly: objects left behind by war are reworked into forms that ask how violence is remembered and what can be rebuilt from it.

The film premiere sits at the centre of the presentation, extending Nguyen's practice of pairing moving image with object-based work. The combination is characteristic of an artist who moves between documentary research and poetic reconstruction.

Nguyen is also the artist behind a 2026 commission for the High Line Plinth in New York, one of the city's most visible public-art platforms. The James Cohan show offers a fuller view of the thinking behind that public work, in the concentrated setting of a gallery exhibition.

Working with salvaged material is central to Nguyen's practice. Objects that survive a war carry their history in their surfaces, and by reworking them into sculpture he asks what can be made from what is left behind. The new film extends that question into moving image, pairing documentary attention with a more poetic register, and the combination of film and object has become the signature of his recent exhibitions.