Advertisement

Speaking Their Peace : Laguna Exhibit Features Artists Whose Works Capture a Gentler Vietnam

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Vietnam . . . war. To most Americans, the words still go together like bride and groom. But a new exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum, a site of the Orange County Museum of Art, attempts to separate the two by training the eye away from bloody conflict.

Unlike recent films, a musical and books, “An Ocean Apart: Contemporary Vietnamese Art From the United States and Vietnam” doesn’t dwell on destruction, says C. David Thomas, who chose most of the show’s 80 paintings, prints, photographs and mixed-media works by 40 artists.

Rather, it seeks to illuminate “the country’s beauty and rich culture,” Thomas said.

Visitors to peacetime Vietnam “have memories of a beautiful land filled with warm and loving people,” Thomas writes in an essay on the collection. “For us, new images have replaced those old images of war.”

Advertisement

“An Ocean Apart,” organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), began a 12-city national tour two years ago in Virginia. The Laguna museum, which also is opening two related exhibits today, will be the exhibition service’s seventh stop.

San Francisco photojournalist Lou Dematteis captures today’s Vietnamese going about daily life--jogging, working, shopping--with “A Portrait of Vietnam,” shot in color.

Ten Orange County residents, all members of the Vietnamese Artistic Photographic Assn., contributed to “Vietnam Through Vietnamese Eyes.” While they shot these poetic black-and-whites in Vietnam during the war, the images show no trace of carnage.

Advertisement

“We want to let the world know we are a peace-loving people,” said well-known area composer Khoa Le, the association’s founder, “and we want to go on with our lives.”

Despite little war-related or political imagery in “An Ocean Apart,” the exhibit has not been without controversy. Some 300 vocal Vietnamese emigres demonstrated against the show when it opened at the San Jose Museum of Art in June.

*

Denouncing it as communist propaganda, protesters demanded that the museum pull the art. Three years earlier, such protests prompted the museum to cancel a similar exhibit, but this time it refused.

Advertisement

Orange County has the largest Vietnamese community outside of Vietnam (about 100,000), and anti-communist dissidents here have orchestrated dozens of political protests (none related to art), one of which, in 1993, drew thousands.

*

Laguna museum officials were somewhat concerned about a protest when they heard about San Jose’s, said senior curator Bolton Colburn, but never considered cancellation.

“We’ve had this arm’s-length relationship with the Vietnamese community for a long time, and this exhibit is a good bridge builder,” Colburn said. “Yes, there’s a small percentage that may be upset for one reason or another, but we think this will be very beneficial to the Vietnamese community and to Orange County.”

Le, well-connected in Little Saigon, said he hadn’t heard about any protest plans. However, when photographer Dematteis came to him weeks ago wanting to give a slide-lecture about his work in the community, Le said he persuaded him not to do so. A book of Dematteis’ work, which pictures communist troops, contains an epilogue by author Le Ly Hayslip, considered to be a communist sympathizer. “We do not want to have any [connection] with the communists,” Le said.

This incident notwithstanding, “An Ocean Apart” was conceived in a spirit of reconciliation. Thomas, an art professor at Boston’s Emmanuel College and a Vietnam veteran, also directs the nonprofit Indochina Arts Project, which promotes cultural exchange. He said in a recent phone interview that he hoped to create a dialogue between Vietnamese people here and abroad.

The work from Vietnam, which he obtained with help from the Vietnamese government, shows the strong influence of the Chinese, who dominated the country for centuries, and the French colonists, who introduced Western modernism.

Advertisement

Still, Vietnamese art has its own style, Laguna curator Colburn said recently at the museum. There’s a lyricism that reflects the people’s closeness to nature, he said, as well as a somberness stemming from years of domination and invasion.

Horror and grief are rarely detectable, however.

“Despite the turmoil under which art in Vietnam has been produced over hundreds of years,” said SITES director Anna R. Cohn, “it has almost no trace of bitterness in it. I think it suggests great resilience, and it’s a profound affirmation of the role of art and its ability to reach beyond social and political constraints and strife.”

Social-protest art also is rare, largely because Vietnamese literature has carried that banner, said Thomas, who curated a Vietnamese art exhibit shown at UCLA in 1991. Some of it surfaces in the immigrants’ work, however. Ho Thanh Duc of Westminster depicts an evil ogre wearing a mask in “King on the Stage” (1989).

“In my lifetime,” Thanh writes in the bilingual exhibit catalog, “the government has been too strong. It doesn’t matter what mask the ruler puts on, he lies to the people and degrades them.”

Generally, work by Vietnamese Americans shows the effect of greater exposure to the international art scene. Materials and styles are more varied. The art often addresses their flight from Vietnam and difficulties of adjusting to a new culture. Viet Nguyen of La Palma paints a useless, bottomless boat in “The Oak and the Boat” (1992).

“The only sure way to escape Vietnam was to have a boat that flew up in the air,” he writes. “Many people never made it.”

Advertisement

“An Ocean Apart” almost never made it out of the gate. After the works were compiled in 1990, the art scene in Vietnam underwent a rapid renaissance when the United States and its former enemy established full diplomatic relations.

Suddenly, with the increased openness and exposure, “a much larger group of artists working in a much greater diversity of styles emerged,” said SITES director Cohn, who nearly canceled the show but, instead, added a handful of works to reflect the change.

That, however, didn’t sit well with Thomas, who is credited by SITES with initiating the exhibit but not as its curator. He objected to the added works, which remain in the show, because “they weren’t of high enough quality,” he said. He believes that they were selected because the artists were “connected politically.”

Neither Thomas nor Cohn would name the artists, but Cohn insisted that “no political choices informed the selection of artists for this exhibition.” She rejected the idea of any of the work as inferior, as does the Laguna museum’s Colburn.

“It’s definitely of equal quality to any exhibit we’ve had here,” Colburn said.

* “An Ocean Apart: Contemporary Vietnamese Art From the United States and Vietnam,” “A Portrait of Vietnam: Lou Dematteis” and “Vietnam Through Vietnamese Eyes” run today through March 30 at Laguna Art Museum, a site of the Orange County Museum of Art, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. $4-$5.

Also at the museum: Dematteis will discuss his work on Feb. 9 at 11 a.m., and Chor-Swang Ngin, professor of anthropology and Asian and Asian American studies at Cal State L.A., will speak about art and politics in Vietnamese culture on March 9 at 11 a.m. Regular admission plus $3.

Advertisement
Advertisement