See a Film That Reimagines History on the Malaysian Island That Served as a Refugee Site After the Vietnam War

In 1978, the small Malaysian island of Pulau Bidong officially opened as a camp housing over 100 Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War. By 1979, some 40,000 refugees were staying on the tiny outcrop of land in the South China Sea. Many people spent months living on the crowded island before resettlement in other countries. About 250,000 Vietnamese refugees had passed through the island by the time the site closed in 1991.

In Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s imagining of the island, historical fact meets speculative fiction. His 2017 film, called The Island, is now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through May 4, 2025, along with a headdress the moving-image and sculpture artist made for the piece.

In Nguyen’s 42-minute work, a character who was born on the island and never left has been there alone for decades. When a scientist washes ashore, she informs him that, due to nuclear conflict, they are now the last two people on Earth. The island, once again, is a refuge. But this time, it’s the last and only one in the world. “Almost every shot in the film is on the island or of the island,” Nguyen says.

In 2017, the film was featured at the Whitney Biennial, an exhibition of contemporary American art organized every two years by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where Saisha Grayson, curator of time-based media at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, saw it for the first time.

“I was completely stopped in my day,” she says. “I had other things I thought I might do, and I was so taken by how beautiful aesthetically it was, but also how powerful the story was.”

Grayson says the film revealed to her a history she hadn’t been familiar with, while also depicting an imagined future that allows viewers to reflect on both the past and the present.

Showing the film at the museum is “a way for us to bring in the narratives and history of a conflict that is very central to American history but from a perspective that very often isn’t centralized in the way that story gets told,” Grayson says.

Writer Chris Klimek spoke to Nguyen about what the island means to history, to his film and to him.

You would have been very, very young, but you did live briefly on Pulau Bidong before eventually settling in the U.S., right?

The story is that our boat came very close to Pulau Bidong, and we landed on Pulau Bidong, but not for very long. My father passed away in 2010. The stories now all are coming from the point of view of my mother, who was at the time very young. So, the story is that we stopped on Pulau Bidong and then we got transferred to the coast of Malaysia, probably near Terengganu.

One thing I really appreciated about The Island is this idea of repurposing news footage or documentary footage in the service of a fictitious narrative, but one that’s still gesturing toward a larger truth. How do you decide what’s appropriate for you to use?

I began trying to find out as much as I could about Pulau Bidong in about 2016, late 2015. One of the ways in which I did that was to actually go to Pulau Bidong. I can’t remember, that was maybe mid-2016. I made my way there with my partner. We actually spent a night there. It’s completely abandoned now. I think the marine biology school that is in Kuala Lumpur has a few tents [or] huts there because they’re studying coral off the coast, but other than that, there’s nobody on the island. And it felt to me that looking at the island through the modality of linear history, that it’s a very extreme place. I mean, at one point, not very long ago, it was the most densely populated location on Earth. Over 40,000 people were stranded there on a piece of land that was the size of a football field. But now it’s this pristine, abandoned island that has still these relics of the monuments and the gravestones and the grave markers and the structures that were built there by the refugees close to 50 years ago.

The research really begins online, watching video testimonials from people in the community that have uploaded their videos, and then finding that amazing footage by Ed Bradley, the CBS correspondent who broke the news on Pulau Bidong. He becomes a character in the film.

I wanted to understand it, but I wanted to understand it through as many perspectives as I possibly could and to understand it through time, not only past time and present time, but future time.

The film is about colonialism and refugees and displaced people, but it’s also about the last two people on Earth. It’s like a little spoonful of sci-fi sugar to draw me in. How much do considerations like that enter into your procedure?

I was fascinated and made to be very curious about the way that people were making objects and monuments on the island, and a lot of the monuments … looked very science fiction. I was thinking about a lot of the stories that have been told to me from people who stayed on the island for a very long time, and the psychological space of a refugee and always kind of being anchored in the past but trying really hard to break that anchor and think about the future.

So, if the last two people on this island are the last two people on Earth, then this island becomes a refuge for all of humanity. And what happens at that point? And that becomes one of the dramatic plot lines that allows me to kind of go back and forth in time and between archival footage, found footage and footage that I build myself.

If you want to go to Pulau Bidong now, do you just get on a boat and go? Do you need to get a permit or something?

If you wanted to visit, you can visit. You just hire a boat from Terengganu. I haven’t been in years, but people still make pilgrimages. Former Vietnamese refugees, Cambodian refugees and even Laotian refugees still make pilgrimages to the island.

Do you see your works as being along a continuum where you’re growing an ambition or thinking of new things you want to try each time?

I’m committed to a practice. I’m not exactly sure how to articulate that practice, to be quite honest. I’m very interested in the traumas of displacement, the traumas of war and traumas of colonialism, and those three things seem to be very tightly interweaved with one another. I’ve made films with Aboriginal people in Western Australia looking at their forced migrations off of their native land. I’ve worked with undocumented migrants in Marseille struggling to save their squats. So yes, sometimes it seems like I have a broad take because the projects take me to different places in the world, but I think you can hone it down to that main concern. What is the struggle about? How are people finding their way through? What does it mean to be resilient, and how do we use storytelling as a form of political resistance or a form of healing?

Chris Klimek | READ MORE

Chris Klimek is a writer and former podcast host for Smithsonian.

Kayla Randall | READ MORE

Kayla Randall is Smithsonian magazine's digital editor, museums.