Vietnamese-born exhibitors find that 'home' is where the art is
(a review of Home/NGOI NHA)

By T. T. Nhu, columnist for the Mercury News
© The San Jose Mercury News, May 4, 1995

Ann Phong's swirling painting depicts a fragile boat in a roiling ocean. A powerful storm has turned the water into mountains and valleys, with waves that, at any moment, could drown the passengers, whose figures are dimly perceived. "I was pushed to the edge of life and death when I escaped," Phong, a 37-year-old artist, says of her terrifying escape from Vietnam in 1981.

Characterized as a "boat person", Phong felt "inferior and subhuman for a long time. But I try to convert that into something positive. There's nothing wrong with being a boat person. The boat saved my life."

Here war-related expressionistic paintings are featured in HOME/NGOI NHA, a multidisciplinary show presented by the Association for Viet Arts. It runs through May 27 at the Works Gallery, 260 Jackson St. San Jose; telephone (408) 295-8378.

'The question of home is a recurring issue for this group of immigrants", says Bui Man, the curator and a performance artist, who came to this country at the age of 17, in 1975. "The longer the Vietnamese-Americans stay in this country, the further the 'home' issue recedes beyond its literal meaning.

"These nine artists who explore the issue use a visual language that is able to express the notion of 'home' in a direction that verbal language cannot", Man says.

They are young, and most are women, which is unusual for Vietnamese arts, a field where men traditionally dominate. Raised and educated in the United States, some have no direct memory of Vietnam, while others retain painful remembrances. These artists share a vision of an emerging generation of Vietnamese-American artists whose work is defined by their traumatic passage and resettlement in the United States.

To make sense of a world destroyed by war, this generation of artists has developed a style of its own - neither Asian nor European. Grappling with their difficulties with language, custom and race, artists such as Phong wonder: "Eighteen years there, 20 years here. I feel half-Vietnamese, half American. My Vietnamese is not good. My English isn't either. It's confusing. You don't know which way to go".

Her gouches relfect her feelings of pain and self-diminshment.

Lien Shutt is a painter and a writer who has penned a witty pamphlet titled "Ten Ways to be Vietnamese and American". To be Vietnamese, she suggests, one needs to "show humility", "suffer quietly", "be humble", "marry a Vietnamese" and "work hard for what you want". By contrast acting American requires that you "not speak with an accent", "be an individual", "demand what you want", "sell yourself", "date white people", "smile!"

Her tryptych of a Vietnamese flag becoming an American flag with red and yellow stripes directly addresses the issues of home and belonging, identity and country.

The exhibit is personal, biographical and informed by a haunting past whose clutches the artists seek to express. "The more I hide it", Ann Phong says, "the more it hurts".

Phong describes her work and journey here with a passion that discloses here fierce desire to participate fullly in the culture of here adopted homeland. "I want to show the Americans that letting me into this country is a positive thing - for the Americans too."

 

E-mail: info@vietarts.org
U. S. Postal Mail: AVA, P. O. Box 90088, San Jose, CA 95109-3088

 

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