Asian Revolutionaries and Asian-American Conservatives, with Matthew Shen Goodman and Minh Nguyen, moderated by Teline Trần

Photo: Ally Caple

On September 13, 2025, Critic and curator Minh Nguyen joined writer and The Baffler editor-in-chief Matthew Shen Goodman in The Classroom at Printed Matter's 2025 NY Art Book Fair for a discussion on Asian politics across borders and how Asian revolutionary legacies shape diaspora politics in unexpected ways, moderated by Teline Trần.

Occasioned by the release of Nguyen’s essay collection Memorial Park, which examines the afterlife of the Vietnamese revolution—both within the country and among Vietnamese Americans, one of the most conservative Asian diaspora groups—the conversation bridges to Shen Goodman’s recent writing and book-in-progress on the roots of right-wing Asian American movements. Together they consider the usefulness of “Asian American” as an analytical framework, and how art and cultural criticism offer approaches to understanding the political realities of place. Presented by Wendy’s Subway and Art Metropole.

See the recording of the program below.

About the speakers

Matthew Shen Goodman is the editor in chief of The Baffler. He was previously a senior editor at Triple Canopy.

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 Ho Chi Minh City focused on art and political graphics, and managing editor of e-flux journal. Her art and film criticism has appeared in publications such as Art in America, Artforum, e-flux, Momus, Mousse, and frieze, and she has curated exhibitions and programs at Wing Luke Museum, Northwest Film Forum, King Street Station, Gene Siskel Film Center, and Chicago Cultural Center. Formerly an instructor at Parsons School of Design—The New School, she has received a Warhol Arts Writers Grant, Fogo Island Arts Writing Award, and New York University’s Asia/Pacific/America Institute Visiting Scholar fellowship.

Minh Nguyen, Memorial Park. Photo: Justin Lubliner

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.