Bowers Pulls Painting in Vietnamese Show

Seeking to balance political sensitivity and artistic freedom, Bowers Museum officials have removed one painting from a planned exhibit of Vietnamese art and may pull others after complaints from anti-Communist activists who plan to picket the show when it opens Saturday.

Officials at the Santa Ana museum, mindful of massive protests organized by the same Vietnamese American activists earlier this year, say they are trying to be sensitive to community concerns.

“We’re not allowing [the Vietnamese community] to dictate what we display. We were giving them an opportunity to voice their views so that we could make an informed decision,” said Janet Baker, curator of Asian art and director of public programs at the Bowers.

But some 1st Amendment advocates and museum experts say the Bowers is taking a dangerous step by letting political pressure influence decisions about which paintings to hang.

“I think it’s incredible that the Bowers Museum would even consider yanking a piece because somebody disagrees with it,” said Ron Talmo, a Santa Ana attorney who specializes in free-speech issues.

The rising controversy is driven by complaints from activists who led weeks of protests in Westminster beginning in January over the display of a Communist flag in a Little Saigon video store. The Bowers show of contemporary paintings from Vietnam, a traveling exhibition displayed at museums across the country in the last 18 months, has the feel of Communist propaganda, the critics say.

Though they acknowledge the art does not contain any explicitly Communist messages, activists say the larger issue is that the exhibition--assembled by a panel of experts in Vietnam and the United States--allows the Vietnamese government to paint a false impression of itself.

“We only want Americans to understand that we fear the Vietnamese government is trying to manipulate things,” said Tuan Anh Ho, head of the Committee for Just Cause of Free Vietnam. The group plans to have protesters at the museum until the show ends Sept. 30.

“The art itself is not the problem,” Westminster attorney Van Thai Tran said. “It’s the intent here. The whole idea . . . that Vietnam is a country that is flourishing in free expression of art and culture is a big lie. That’s Hanoi trying to do a soft sell.”

After weeks of meetings with activists, museum officials preparing for Saturday’s opening of the show said this week that they will withhold at least one painting: “Young Woman Forging Steel,” a tempera-on-canvas work that depicts a young girl clad in the uniform of a North Vietnamese soldier.

The museum also is considering removal of a handful of others from the collection of 75 pieces, including one titled “Love” that depicts a woman with a red water buffalo and another called “Mother’s Heart” that shows pictures of young soldiers in the background as a woman prays before an altar. Critics say the paintings contain symbols that implicitly advocate the Communist cause.

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Bowers officials say they are not compromising their artistic standards--only being sensitive to community concerns. The museum, which specializes in exhibits that seek to explain cultures through art, has hosted controversial shows in the past.

Baker said the museum carefully weighed all factors, from space needs to comments made by Vietnamese community members during a preview show two weeks ago.

“In this instance, because of what happened earlier this year, we sensed we could move into an area where a large number of people might be quite hurt,” she said.

The brewing controversy spotlights the difficult decisions museums regularly face: balancing their right to display provocative pieces with their responsibility to their audience’s sensitivities, museum experts say.

“Museums are in danger of being criticized in either direction, regardless of what they do,” said Teri Knoll, executive director of the California Assn. of Museums.

In this case, the Bowers’ decision is appropriate, given that museums are “first and foremost there for the community they serve,” she said. “Museums don’t operate in a vacuum. Though they do present controversial pieces and shows at times, it’s always done with considerable research and thought beforehand. They have to take into account the concerns of the community.”

But others say it makes for a troubling precedent for a museum to remove works because of public pressure.

“It’s a slippery slope. Once you begin to acquiesce to public pressure, then where do you stop?” said professor Mike McGee, head of the exhibition design and museum studies program at Cal State Fullerton.

Many museums have weathered community criticism over art. Some have resisted pressure to remove works from an exhibition, McGee said. Others have complied with demands from activists.

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In 1990, for example, the city-run Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton pulled a photograph of rock star John Lennon--in the nude--and his wife, Yoko Ono, that had run on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

“In many ways, that organization never recovered from that incident,” McGee said. “It’s a tough thing. It’s something you want to avoid if at all possible.”

Museums do have alternatives that allow them to preserve artistic integrity while responding to a community’s concerns, McGee said. Such steps could include opening up exhibit space for alternative works or creating a forum for the public to speak out.

The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, for example, answered outrage over sexually explicit photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1990 by showcasing the objectionable works separately with warnings for the viewers.

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“To my mind, that would be a better way to deal with it,” McGee said.

Lawyer Talmo said removing works would hurt the exhibit in the end.

“The more art pieces, the more variety. The more different views we have, the better off we’ll be,” said Talmo, who has clashed with Vietnamese activists before as a lawyer for Truong Van Tran, the video store owner who sparked protests in Little Saigon by hanging a Communist flag. “That’s a principle of the way we live in this country.”

Not everyone in the Vietnamese American community believes the exhibit should be boycotted.

“I’m as anti-Communist as anyone, but people have to realize you can’t undo the past,” said Quang X. Pham, a businessman and former U.S. Marine Corps pilot who was invited to the preview show two weeks ago. “I think everyone should come see and judge for themselves. Otherwise, it’s censorship.”

The exhibition, titled “A Winding River,” was put together by Meridian International Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit international arts organization that last year co-sponsored an exhibit of works from Latin America, Spain and the Caribbean at the Fullerton Museum Center. The drawings and paintings, chosen by an independent panel of American and Vietnamese art experts, include works from as early as the 1930s, but most were created in the last five years, said Curtis Sandberg, the group’s director of exhibitions.

“We’re well aware there’s a lot of pain and suffering from the Vietnam War experience, and we’re sympathetic. But we’re hoping the show becomes a point of discussion for the whole community,” he said.

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Plans have been underway for two years to bring the exhibit to Southern California. Since its debut in 1997, the show has traveled to Plano, Texas; Minneapolis; Atlanta; Biloxi, Miss., and the San Francisco suburb of Moraga.

Only in Plano did the show run into some controversy. Vietnam War veterans along with members of the Vietnamese American community, which numbers about 60,000 in that area, staged protests before and during the show’s three-month run.

The museum resisted pressure to close or alter the exhibit, said James Wear, executive director of the ArtCentre of Plano.

“A protest doesn’t bother me. In this case, we felt this was the right thing to do,” he said.