Refugees’ Art Reflects Old and New Vietnam

Black ink slashes white silk, and a lost world emerges.

A water buffalo dips one curved horn into a rice paddy. An ancient woman clutches a bowl. A mother comforts her child, touching her cheek to his smaller one in a gesture of infinite tenderness.

These spare brush strokes made Be Ky a celebrity in the Saigon art world at the age of 18. A year ago, at the age of 51, she and her husband, Ho Thanh Duc, a renowned collagist, left Vietnam, settling recently in Garden Grove.

The couple has joined a tiny but productive community of Vietnamese artists in exile. Many live or paint in Orange County, but their unlikely focal point is a gallery in Burbank. It is owned by a young etcher, Nguyen Viet, who has been trying to introduce paintings and sculpture by Vietnamese refugees to the American market.

Their works range from traditional brush-and-ink drawings to primitivist sketches, modern acrylics and post-modern etching. Some are fierce, like Ho Thanh Duc’s marbled collages of an anguished Christ. Others are sentimental. Yet the artists express common themes: melancholy, nostalgia and transcendence.

“I don’t want (Westerners) to think of Vietnam as just a war-torn country,” said Nguyen Thi Hop, 46, who layers watercolor onto silk to produce ethereal scenes of rural life a century ago. “I want to show them that the other side of Vietnam is beautiful and poetic.”

If the art is serene, the artists’ lives have not been.

Be Ky and her husband were both war orphans. At the age of 12, she went to live with an abusive artist who recognized her talent and exploited it.

“I came to his family because I wanted to learn,” Be Ky said through an interpreter at the Burbank gallery, where her recent paintings are hung. “He taught me very little, and I learned a lot from other people. . . . I had to hide my paintings from him.”

By 16, her adoptive father had her hawking her ink caricatures on the streets of Saigon. “If I earned a lot of money, I brought it home and they were very happy. But if the money was little, they would beat me up,” she recalled.

A French art critic came across her sketches and arranged for the 18-year-old girl to have a one-woman show at the Alliance Francaise in Saigon in 1957. It sold out. But as her fame brought exhibitions in Paris and Tokyo, relations with her adoptive father deteriorated. One day, she said, she discovered that he had been forging her name on his paintings to bring a higher price for them on the street.

When she confronted him, he struck her across the head, leaving her deaf in one ear. Nearly 30 years later, it was that disability that finally convinced Vietnamese authorities to allow the couple to leave their homeland for Manila in 1989.

Ho Thanh Duc’s father died fighting the Japanese, and his mother abandoned the infant to remarry. Duc became a domestic servant.

An aunt rescued him from the street when he was 11, and by his early 20s he was an art student who had decided to concentrate on collage.

He sold his first collage to an American Army captain for 7,000 dong-- a princely sum then equal to a month’s pay for a high government official. Better yet, “when (the captain) went back to Philadelphia, he sent me oils,” Duc said.

The faces of Christ and Buddha and the drab colors of war figure prominently in Duc’s art. One series of collages that brought him early fame was made of torn fragments of robes given him by Buddhist monks. One robe was said to have belonged to a monk who immolated himself.

The celebrated couple declined offers to leave South Vietnam before the 1975 communist takeover. By 1977, however, they had changed their minds. “We had no freedom to chose our subjects, and we could not produce art under the censorship of the government,” Duc said.

A botched attempt to flee by boat brought him a two-year prison sentence. By 1981, he had obtained a visa for the United States, but he waited eight more years for permission to leave. In 1989, the couple revived their careers with two joint exhibitions in the Philippines, where Be Ky presented President Corazon Aquino with a Madonna sketch.

Now they have converted their suburban patio to a joint studio. At 50, Duc is learning to drive. Be Ky is adjusting to a hearing aid. Her husband jokes that he has sewn half his mouth shut to lower his usual volume. He can even whisper in her ear. For the first time in their married life, he noted with glee, they can keep secrets from their four children.

Nguyen Khai tried to paint peace. Born in Hue, Vietnam, he studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Saigon in the early ‘60s. On Vietnamese lacquer, he painted abstract tableaux of doves, mandolins and women with fluid limbs and hair. He helped found an association of young artists, grew famous and managed to dodge the draft.

In 1975, a North Vietnamese official came to visit his studio and explained that abstract painting would not be appreciated under the new regime. Khai attended re-education lectures, where it was suggested that he abandon bourgeois romanticism and tackle subjects from everyday life.

“They wanted me to draw realistic life in Vietnam, but once I did it, they didn’t like it, because it was too realistic,” said Khai, 50, who fled for Indonesia by boat in 1981 and eventually settled in Tustin.

Since coming to the West, he said, his colors have gotten brighter.

“I feel more happy, and I feel relieved,” he said. “So most of my paintings have more movement. And movement expresses freedom.

“In all my paintings, I don’t want to express my sorrow for my country and the war,” Khai added. “I want to express the beauty of my country. . . . I have suffered a lot, but I don’t want other people to see what I suffered. I just want to bring happiness.”

Khai is virtually unknown outside Vietnam, and commercial success has eluded him. Refugee status has compounded the panoply of problems all artists face. His work, though, has been shown at UC Irvine, UCLA and several small Orange County galleries, and a new show will open Aug. 3 at the Studio Gallery and Framing Inc. in Burbank.

“It is so hard for these people, a lot of them say they want to give up,” said gallery owner Nguyen Viet, who had a show last December for four Vietnamese artists, all boat people. “I keep telling them not to give up.”

In Nguyen Thi Hop’s family, “art was something with too much freedom for women.” When she was accepted into the National Academy of Art in Saigon, she had to promise her father she would become an art teacher before he would allow her to go.

Hop married an artist and philosophy teacher, Nguyen Dong. They were interested in art, not politics, but after 1975, Dong was not permitted to teach, and they were set to drawing labor posters. Their daughter was told to report back on her parents’ activities. In 1979, they left by boat, and though they were robbed by Thai pirates, they survived the trip to Malaysia.

In the Pulau Bidong refugee camp, a friend finally gave them a roll of blueprint paper and a box of wax crayons. They had both been influenced by Henri Rousseau; now they used a naif style as a match for their crude materials and their primitive surroundings. With their daughter, they drew 30 sketches of life in the refugee camp.

The colorful simplicity of these drawings does not disguise the hardships. There is a vista of a denuded hillside where Dong cut and carried logs to build his family a crude cabin covered with rice bags. Hop drew the scene near the central well, where crowds of women came for water to carry back to their shacks.

A Canadian saw their work. “He asked us if we would sell these drawings in Canada, to raise money to help people in the camps,” said Dong, now 49. “But even though we had no money, nothing, we didn’t want to sell. They are souvenirs.”

They did lend the drawings for a charity exhibition, though, and hope to exhibit them in the United States. After a stint in West Germany, they rejoined family members in Gardena and are working as graphic artists for Nguoi Viet Daily News, a Vietnamese-language newspaper based in Westminster.

In a corner of the newspaper’s paste-up room, Hop and Dong use their spare moments to produce illustrations for cookbooks, novels and children’s books, the gay colors and rounded figures giving their work an unfettered charm. Their fine art is done at home at night.

Hop, 46, draws placid scenes of robust country women washing or eating fruit, of children playing in a dreamland of temples and screened verandas. Light radiates from their skin as from Venetian saints. Dong paints idyllic scenes of water buffalo, banana trees and fish ponds.

They paint a Vietnam that existed maybe a century ago, or perhaps never existed at all--a world too gentle for war, a land unscathed by napalm or defoliant.

“We get the beautiful image of what our country was like before the war from our parents or our grandparents,” Dong said. “Not from our own experience.”