Under Fire, Bowers Lets Painting Stay

Besieged with calls complaining of censorship, the director of the Bowers Museum on Thursday decided to restore a controversial painting to an exhibit of Vietnamese contemporary art set to open this weekend.

Museum executive director Peter Keller reversed a decision made earlier this week to withhold the work, titled “Young Woman Forging Steel.” Museum officials had planned to leave out the painting, which depicts a young girl in the uniform of a North Vietnamese soldier, because some in Orange County’s Vietnamese American community found it offensive.

“We have reconsidered due to the tremendous outpouring of calls from members of the community” who wanted to see the exhibit in its entirety, he said.

Keller, who also sought advice from other museum directors, said he made the decision without consulting the Santa Ana museum’s board of trustees or his own curator of Asian art, Janet Baker. Typically, decisions about which pieces to display are made in committee.

Museum officials said earlier this week they were trying to be sensitive to community concerns in the wake of anti-Communist protests this year over the display of a Communist flag in a Little Saigon video store. They also were concerned about finding enough exhibit space for all 75 works in the show.

The Bowers received 60 to 75 phone calls and e-mails on Thursday in the wake of the museum’s announcement that it would remove the piece from the show, most arguing that art institutions should not censor exhibitions, officials said.

Baker said she is still concerned the exhibit may offend some patrons, but supports Keller’s decision.

“My own feeling is that I’m pleased that members of our community are interested and care deeply about these questions. My greatest fear is apathy,” Baker said.

Lowell Martindale, chairman of the museum board, also backed the decision by Keller, who was rehired for five years by trustees last month. Trustees rely on Bowers staff to balance competing interests and have not been involved in decisions about this exhibit, he said.

“We’re not out there to gratuitously offend the public, [but] as a general rule, I don’t think you display art based on popularity,” Martindale said.

Though artworks are typically chosen for purely artistic reasons, Keller admitted that the initial decision to pull the controversial painting was a political one.

“I would plead guilty to that,” he said. Keller said he too was “not a fan of North Vietnamese army uniforms, having spent a year there” in South Vietnam in the U.S. military during the war.

Some members of the Vietnamese American community had raised concerns that the artwork, a traveling exhibition displayed at museums across the country in the last 18 months, portrayed the nation’s Communist government in a sympathetic light.

The museum’s reversal on the painting that was to be withheld is unfortunate, said Duc Trong Do, president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, but singling out any work in the exhibit “is not the point.”

The entire exhibit “is still from the Communist regime and we cannot accept that,” he said. Plans to protest the exhibition starting on Saturday until it closes Sept. 30 have not changed, he said.

The exhibition, titled “A Winding River,” was put together by Meridian International Center, a Washington-based nonprofit international arts organization. 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.

The exhibit is the first cultural exchange project between the two nations since the United States and Vietnam reestablished diplomatic relations in 1995.

Plans had 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, held protests before and during the show’s three-month run.