Vietnamese Artists Depict Visions of Their Homeland in New Setting

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. Six months ago, she and her husband Ho Thanh Duc, a renowned collagist, joined a tiny but productive community of Vietnamese artists in exile in Southern California.

And now their 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-modernist etching. Some are fierce, such as Ho Thanh Duc’s marbled collages of a anguished Christ. Others are sentimental. Yet the artists express common themes: melancholy, nostalgia and transcendence.

Westerners should not “think of Vietnam as a 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.

“He taught me very little, and I learned a lot from other people . . .” Be Ky said through an interpreter at Studio Gallery and Framing Inc. in Burbank, where her recent paintings are hung. “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.”

A French art critic came across her sketches and arranged a one-woman show for the 18-year-old. It sold out. Fame brought more exhibitions in Paris and Tokyo, but 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 persuaded Vietnamese authorities to allow the couple to depart for Manila in 1989.

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

“They more or less sold me from one family to another,” he said. “One time somebody bought me and used makeup to make me very ugly, and took me out begging.”

An aunt rescued him from the street when he was 11. By his late teens, he was already fascinated by collage. The French artist George Braque inflamed him, but there were also practical concerns. “I didn’t have any money to buy paint,” he said. Instead, he tore paper from “ ‘Paris Match,’ ‘Life’ magazine, whatever had color in it--even cigarette packs.”

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 in protest.

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

A botched attempt to flee by boat brought Duc a two-year prison sentence. They waited a decade 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.

They have settled in Garden Grove, where they have converted their suburban patio to a studio. At 50, Duc is learning to drive. Be Ky is adjusting to a hearing aide. Her husband jokes that for the first time in their married life he can whisper in her ear--and they can keep secrets from their four children.

Nguyen Khai tried to paint peace. On Vietnamese lacquer he created abstract tableaux of doves, mandolins and women with fluid limbs and hair. He helped found a union of young artists, did not shun fame, 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 welcomed by the new regime. Khai attended re-education lectures, where it was suggested that he abandon bourgeois romanticism and tackle subjects from everyday life.

The new government bought three of Khai’s older paintings and hung them in the national gallery in Hanoi. But they were displeased by his new oil of a woman in a torn blouse. It was intended to depict poverty and misery, Khai said, but there wasn’t supposed to be misery in the new Vietnam.

“They wanted me to draw realistic life in Vietnam, but once I did it, they didn’t like it because it was too realistic,” Khai said through an interpreter.

He was sent to paint scenes of workers in factories, with the results to be shown to the political officer in charge. In one painting, Khai showed a laborer but failed to detail all of the machinery in the background.

“They said, ‘Don’t leave anything out. . . . They wanted to show that they had a lot of technology,” he said. He used his travel pass to scout for ways to leave the country, and fled by boat with his wife and two children in 1981.

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

“Most of my paintings have more movement,” Khai said. “And movement expresses freedom.”

The 50-year old artist is virtually unknown here, and commercial success has eluded him. Refugee status has compounded the panoply of artists’ usual problems. But his work has been shown at UC Irvine and UCLA, and several small Orange County galleries, and a new show will open Aug. 3 in Burbank.

Khai’s larger paintings are done on lacquer, with eggshells that must be carefully applied, then sanded down, and topped with gold and silver leaf.

“I recently sold that painting to a Caucasian woman for $3,000,” Khai said, pointing to a large ocher and gold abstract. “But it took me two months.”

“It is so hard for these people. A lot of them say they want to give up,” said gallery owner Nguyen Viet. “I keep telling them not to give up.”

Nguyen Thi Hop and Nguyen Dong were trained in fine technique at the National Academy of Art in Saigon, but their most vibrant work was done with children’s crayons.

The couple fled Vietnam on an overcrowded boat in 1979, survived a parched journey and robbery by Thai pirates, and wound up in the Pulau Bidong refugee camp in Malaysia. Finally, a friend gave them a roll of blueprint paper and a box of wax crayons.

They had each been influenced by Henri Rousseau; now the naif style seemed to match for their crude materials and their primitive surroundings.

The colorful simplicity of their drawings does not disguise the hardships of camp life. Dong drew a vista of a denuded hillside where he had cut and carried logs to build them a crude cabin. Hop drew women gathering at the central well and hauling water 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,” Dong said. “But even though we had no money, nothing, we didn’t want to sell. They are souvenirs.”

Now they work as graphic artists for a Vietnamese-language newspaper, and illustrate books in their spare time. Gay colors and rounded figures give their work an unfettered charm.

Hop, 46, draws placid scenes of robust country women washing or eating fruit, of children playing in temple gardens or screened verandas. Light radiates from their skin as from Venetian saints. Dong, 49, paints idyllic scenes of water buffalo, banana trees and fish ponds.

They paint a Vietnam that existed perhaps 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.”