Tammy Nguyen's Debut Opera Heads to Venice Biennale Finale

Artist Tammy Nguyen will present the foreword to her debut opera Timaeus and The Teacher at the 61st Venice Biennale's closing program on November 13 and 14. The performance arrives at the end of an eventful edition of the international contemporary art festival, one already marked by a historic strike.

The aria is the entry point to a still-unfinished opera. Nguyen traces the national and ideological impacts of the Vietnam War and fuses Plato's theories of the cosmos with enduring questions of identity. Her father's experience as a refugee aboard a vessel in the South China Sea inspired the work.

The story centers on a Vietnamese English teacher who tries to flee Saigon by boat two years after North Vietnamese forces captured the capital in 1975. Grammy-nominated tenor Brian Vu sings the libretto as the titular teacher, while dancers maneuver around him with a tapestry composed of flags.

"I was really fascinated by what happened at sea, as are many children of refugees from war-torn countries," Nguyen told Hyperallergic in a phone interview. "The South China Sea is such a heavily trafficked area, and it created little stories where humans and the global economy collided."

How the opera is built

Wesleyan University, where Nguyen teaches as an associate professor, commissioned and produced the work. Its themes echo her other projects, including a series of paintings on view at the biennale's Central Pavilion through November 22.

The flag tapestry extends her 2024 exhibition Timaeus and the Nations at the Sarasota Art Museum, where she rearranged 46 "flags of convenience" — the practice in which ship operators change their flags for tax and regulation benefits.

Choreographer Jamal Jackson has the dancers configure the tapestry into mountain ranges, a ship, the sea, and the cosmological diagram championed by the Pythagorean philosopher of Plato's dialogue Timaeus. Composer Neely Bruce remixed national anthems into the score.

Nguyen built the libretto by breaking down traditional English language structures through a fractal sequence — a self-repeating mathematical pattern. "Opera has a gestalt of sorts, just this massive tapestry of coming together and telling a story," she said, adding that she has aimed to direct an opera since learning to play and write music in San Francisco.

"I took the anthems of all the countries in the flags of convenience, extracted various lyrics, and hybridized them arbitrarily for the libretto," Nguyen said. As Vu's character journeys across the sea, the musical accompaniments mirror his literal and ideological movements.

What does this change for the Biennale's finale?

For visitors, the closing program expands beyond Nguyen's aria. The final days also include:

• A gathering around a Ouija board led by Hagar Ophir
• Stories of cultivation and global exchange with Lebanese artists Ziad Antar, Hatem Imam and Nayla Mabsout
• A meditation on salt as an essential mineral from Nathalie Vairac

It's unclear when audiences will see the full production of the opera. Nguyen aims to complete it by Bruce's 85th birthday, in fall 2029 — which makes the Venice preview the only scheduled look at the work for now.

"The idea of nationhood is so flexible," Nguyen stated. "But people die over it and fight over it, questioning whether they belong. We grapple with these questions all the time, as people who are looking to feel at home or develop a sense of agency for ourselves."