Colors of a Culture : Vietnamese Americans’ Visual At Is Getting Broader Attention

Month after month, the terror returned whenever Ann Phong looked at the ocean. During four unspeakable days at sea, death felt as close as the waves that ceaselessly licked the sides of the boat.

Painting, however, has helped Phong confront the memories of her flight from Vietnam a dozen years ago. By giving form and color to her fear and pain with roiling, vivid tableaux, she has found release.

“The more I hide it,” she says, “the more it hurts me.”

Viet Nguyen, also a painter, escaped Vietnam hours before Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, tearing himself from two brothers and a sister who remain there, and his mother, who died later there. But his abstract, pastel-hued scenes from nature rarely express trauma or despair.

“It doesn’t do any good,” he says. “Let it go. Move on to the next step.”

Phong and Nguyen--both featured in a recent Cal State Fullerton exhibit of art by Vietnamese Americans, Orange County’s largest such show ever--may take radically different approaches, but they represent the significant inroads that these new Americans are making into this country’s contemporary art scene.

Visual artists aren’t the only ones whose presence is being felt. In the 20 years since Vietnam War refugees began moving into Orange County and turning its Little Saigon into the largest Vietnamese community in the United States, a vibrant--if largely undiscovered--arts culture has developed there. Traditional music ensembles exist alongside groups that pump out Vietnamese rock and rap. There is Vietnamese-language radio and television. Three of the five largest Vietnamese publishing companies in the United States are based in Orange County.

Chapman University professor Richard Turner, who in 1987 curated one of the county’s first exhibits of art by local Vietnamese, points to a quantifiable sign of their mainstream penetration: When he placed an ad in the national magazine Artweek soliciting slides for a recent exhibit, Vietnamese American artists accounted for at least 5% of the responses, even though the show had nothing to do with Vietnam or the war.

“Ten years ago, I would not have reached Vietnamese artists from an ad in Artweek,” Turner says. “Now I am, and I’m glad. Assimilation is happening. A ghettoized show of Vietnamese artists is becoming less and less representative of the situation.”

Many of these artists, like any artists, have a hard time selling their work.

“Sometimes you feel frustrated. You feel like in America, everything is money,” says Chi Le, a Westminster resident who also was part of CSUF’s “New Generation” exhibit.

Others encounter growing acceptance but, ironically, only outside of the Vietnamese community, where contemporary aesthetics are rejected by some who cling to the traditionalism favored in their native land. Language and other cultural differences can pose daunting challenges as well.

Nonetheless, some of the country’s leading art organizations have staged or plan to open shows featuring Vietnamese Americans, many of whom live or exhibit regularly in Orange County:

* Nguyen, of La Palma, will take part in “An Ocean Apart,” an exhibit to be taken around the country in September by SITES, the touring arm of Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, which hopes to bring the show to Orange County. Nguyen also was in a show organized by the independent Boston-based IndoChina Art Project that toured the United States for three years and is on view in Vietnam.

* Westminster’s Le, in addition to being part of the Cal State Fullerton show, had work in “A Different War: Vietnam in Art,” curated by art writer Lucy Lippard in 1989 at the Whatcom Museum of History & Art in Washington state. The show went on to tour six U.S. cities.

* Hanh Thi Pham, a CSUF graduate included in Turner’s ’87 show at Chapman and a show two years ago at Rancho Santiago College, is among 20 artists in the first-ever show of contemporary art at New York’s Asia Society.

A number of local exhibits are planned as part of Project 20, an ambitious yearlong commemoration of the anniversary of the first refugees’ arrival and a celebration of their accomplishments here (see box).

“Vietnamese American artists are definitely beginning to emerge” nationally, and a great many of them come from Southern California, says Susan Ades, a former SITES project director who helped develop “An Ocean Apart.”

Some work by Vietnamese Americans explores experiences and perceptions shared by other immigrant groups. A piece in the CSUF exhibit entitled “Tool for a Newcomer” consisted of an English dictionary affixed to the end of a tree branch, as if it were the blade of a knife. Through slide projections, an installation called “Progeny” explored conflicts in the artist’s relationship with her white boyfriend.

Other works, such as Phong’s paintings about her escape, open a window onto a uniquely Vietnamese world. But Farid Hassan, co-curator of the Cal State Fullerton show, says the idea was to showcase universality, not differences, among people. “Anger, loss, passion, hope--these are feelings we can all relate to,” Hassan notes.

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Centuries-long domination of Vietnam by China left behind a lasting tradition of silk and lacquer painting. Then, French colonization exposed South Vietnamese artists to Western modernism. Communist-enforced social realism prevailed throughout the country after Saigon fell in 1975.

Work by emigrants to America often reflects these styles, passe by today’s Western standards.

By now, though, a generation of Vietnamese artists trained in American colleges and universities is producing work with a current, Western sensibility, according to Trang Nguyen, co-curator of the CSUF exhibit. “Now,” says Nguyen who, like Hassan, recently received a graduate art degree from the university, “you see a wealth of new materials” and such contemporary art forms as installation, performance art and video.

Content has changed too. Some observers say that, particularly early on, artists here with relatives still in Vietnam didn’t dare address the war or any political issue for fear of Communist government reprisal against their families back home.

“The community is not willing to threaten their safety, through art or any other vehicle,” says curator Dorrit Rawlins, who often has included Vietnamese artists in exhibits at the Irvine Fine Arts Center.

But Phong, who left her parents, brother and sister behind, says she has no such trepidation despite her work’s war-related, Expressionist imagery.

“I’m in a free country. If I don’t speak up, we will never have a voice,” says the 37-year-old Anaheim resident, noting that no harm has come to her family so far. “I would be jailed if I showed my work in Vietnam, so I am lucky I’m in America, that I can speak up.”

Ironically, Phong and some of her American-trained colleagues feel their work is disdained by certain fellow expatriates--typically older and trained in Vietnam--who can’t fathom what they perceive as insistence on dredging up horrific memories.

Phong says that one artist, whom she wouldn’t name, once asked her why she keeps “painting things about my past . . . who asks how come I don’t consider myself an American.” Phong asserts that this artist “suppresses those painful times” and creates art that merely amounts to “pretty things to look at.

“I blend today and yesterday in my work,” Phong says. “The past influences me today.”

Nguyen, who most often leaves the war out of his paintings, sees it not as suppression but as a way to dispel limiting stereotypes.

“The Vietnamese have a wonderful, 4,000-year history, which is very rich in the arts,” he says. “But the American public so strongly identifies our culture with war and sadness. I want to change that image.”

A deep rift also exists between Vietnamese artists who embrace a contemporary aesthetic and those who lean toward the traditional. Hanh Thi Pham--who unabashedly addresses her lesbianism in her photo-and-text pieces, in which she sometimes appears nude--says she lives in Glendora because she was ostracized by conservative Vietnamese in Orange County.

“They think that women have to paint pretty flowers,” says Pham, “and that all women must wear makeup and appear like contestants in a beauty pageant, and I am very much against that. After a while, it became dangerous for them to have women like me around, because if I was involved in the community, I would spread my thinking.”

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The language barrier has been especially formidable for Vietnamese struggling to break into the rigidly competitive mainstream art scene.

Le has displayed her paintings and three-dimensional work in shows organized by such established institutions as the Laguna Art Museum and the Whatcom but, she says, organizations have sought her out, not vice versa.

“We lack information about how to get into the galleries, how to get represented in a museum,” Le says. “I don’t know how. And there’s a language problem. Like, you have to write a resume, and I don’t know how to write a resume, and I don’t know where to send it. And we have to meet the people, and I’m scared. Maybe I’m just too shy.”

After seeing Le’s work at the Irvine Fine Arts Center, Laguna Art Museum curator Bolton Colburn recommended that the museum acquire her mixed media assemblage “No Place Like Home” for its permanent collection.

The garishly colored piece, which has been on view at the museum and shown in area schools, deals with Le’s childhood in war-torn Vietnam. It consists of a thatched hut, bright orange toy ants symbolizing insects Le played with as a child, and a pink plastic baby doll whose chubby legs tremble horribly when viewers turn a lever.

Colburn likens it to the darkly perverse, politically charged work of Los Angeles artists Mike Kelley or Jim Shaw and calls Le “heroic” for “dealing with very personal issues” in a style “that may go against her culture’s traditional art.

“She’s definitely addressing issues we all can relate to, because in some ways, we all went through the Vietnam War. But it’s incredibly fascinating to see the work of a Vietnamese who lived there and went through it.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

PROJECT 20

Art exhibits:

* Friday-March 24 (closed Saturday and Sunday): “Refugee Life: The First 20 Years,” exhibit of photography, with oral history audio tapes of refugees. West Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton. Noon-4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Free. (714) 773-3355.

* Friday-Dec. 22: “Southeast Asians in Southern California: A Journey and a Celebration,” exhibit of clothing, musical instruments and other artifacts. Anthropology Museum (Room 313, Humanities and Social Sciences building), Cal State Fullerton. Opens at 5 p.m.; hours thereafter are 2-5 p.m. Mondays through Fridays. Free. (714) 773-3977.

* Saturday-April 18 (tentative): Exhibit of photography and sculpture by Lai Huu Duc. Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Assn. (VAALA), 11022 Acacia Parkway, Suite A, Garden Grove. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. Free. (714) 537-8352.

* March 31-April 6 (closed Saturday and Sunday): “7,305 Days,” exhibit of contemporary art by Ann Phong and Hoang Vu. East Art Gallery, Cal State Fullerton. Noon-4 p.m. Friday and Monday through Thursday. Free. (714) 773-3262.

* April 15-May 15: Exhibit of works by Vietnamese American artists. UC Irvine Main Library, off Campus and Pereira roads, Irvine. 8 a.m.-1 a.m. Mondays through Thursdays; 8 a.m.-9 p.m. Fridays; 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturdays; noon-1 a.m. Sundays. Free. (714) 824-4968.

* April 19, 1 p.m.: “Beyond the Killing Fields: Life in a Cambodian Refugee Camp,” slide show of work by Kari Rene Hall, staff photographer, Times Orange County Edition, of Khmer refugees living along the border between Thailand and Vietnam. Titan Pavilion, Cal State Fullerton. Free. (714) 773-2414.