Minh Nguyen w/ Charles Mudede, MEMORIAL PARK: REVISITING VIETNAM

Writer and curator Minh Nguyen visits the store for her collection Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam, a collection of essays pairing travelogue and criticism, Nguyen encounters relics of proletarian romance and vestiges of totalitarian control amid an evermore corporatized society, fifty years after the Fall of Saigon and twenty years after her family's emigration to America. She is joined by Seattle writer Charles Mudede.

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 totalitarian 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. Her investigations reveal a nation at odds with its past, caught between preserving its socialist legacy and embracing capitalist transformation.

Driven by a diasporic curiosity that seeks discovery over dwelling on loss, Memorial Park refuses nostalgic idealism or reflexive condemnation. Instead, Nguyen takes seriously the legacy of Vietnamese liberation by naming what it has become—and what it decidedly is not. The result is a nuanced portrait of contemporary Vietnam and a meditation on how we inherit, understand, and ultimately reckon with radical histories that shaped our world.

Minh Nguyen is a writer, curator, and author of the essay collection Memorial Park (2025, Wendy's Subway/Art Metropole). Her art and film criticism has appeared in publications such as Art in America, Mousse, Momus, and e-flux journal where she is managing editor. She is also the director of Dogma Collection in Saigon, which houses an archive of Vietnamese revolutionary-era art, and has organized exhibitions and programs at Metrograph, Wing Luke Museum, Gene Siskel Film Center, and Chicago Cultural Center. She is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant Award and Fogo Island Arts Writing Award.

Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born American cultural critic, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. He is the Senior Staff Writer of The Stranger, and has collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on three films, two of which Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and one of which, Zoo, screened at Cannes, and the most recent of which, Suburban Fury, premiered at New York Film Festival. (Police Beat is now part of MOMA’s permanent collection.) Mudede, whose essays regularly appear in e-flux and Tank Magazine, is also the director of Thin Skin (2023). His book People of the Universe will be released by e-flux in January 2027.

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