Artists Create a New Self-Image

His self-portrait is a black-and-white photograph, two images of him merging somewhere near the middle with blur and darkness. His facial features are unrecognizable. It is a sad image of a man adrift among two cultures and homes and languages, and one that Ryan Pham figures will define the rest of his life.

A photographer and artist and a Vietnamese and an American, Pham says that of all the photos he has taken--of other people in Vietnam and of himself--this is the only one that precisely captures his essence. At 31, the Westminster man admits he does not know who he is or where he belongs. “I have no face,” he says.

Pham is among a relatively small number of Vietnamese immigrants who settled in Orange County and became artists. They are credited with helping to produce a fleeting genre that is a blend of traditional and modern techniques and gives voice to a generation dislocated by war and communism.

“It’s exciting to watch, the subject matter, and paintings that deal with the subject of the Vietnam War, of immigration,” said Janet Baker, past curator of Asian art at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. “But the future of Vietnamese art is not in the United States but in Vietnam. Here, people already feel a great gap. Once the following generations assimilate, there won’t be much of that kind of art, or anything at all.”

As it stands, however, Vietnamese American art has bloomed into a world of painters and poets and actors who explore their history as a matter of personal discovery, and emotional necessity.

The past surfaces in the artists’ work in different ways. Some embrace it. Others try to ignore it, determined instead to focus on beauty. Some want to move beyond the painful history. But they all struggle, daily, to carve an identity out of the cultural confusion that came after the war.

Through his work, Pham illustrates how it feels to be a stranger in the home he left in 1987. He photographs fishing villages, a little girl who lives in a graveyard, poor people in Calvin Klein caps. He uses a wide-angle lens so those who distrust him cannot tell what he is photographing. It saddens him: The only way he can study his history, and convey it to the world, is by speaking his nonnative tongue, and looking through the artificial eye that is his camera.

“Vietnam is my home,” Pham says, “but I do not recognize it when I go there. I don’t recognize my old house. If I don’t speak English, [Vietnamese people] think I am from the government or the newspaper. So I wear sunglasses and speak English.”

Ann Phong: Paintings of Isolation

It was 1981 when painter Ann Phong left Vietnam, alone, on a boat. She married an engineer who cares about her paintings but, she says, does not understand them. So, she lives in another kind of isolation now, one that reaches into her living room, where she paints images of boats and war.

Somehow, she says, her isolation sustains her. Her work has been a journey back to where she started.

Phong, 43, is an art instructor at Cal State Fullerton. Her paintings, of oil and acrylic, are modern--her brush strokes, her materials, the way her characters move. But they are often violent images of an exclusively Asian world. She is surprised when people buy them.

Part of the initial wave of immigrants to settle in places such as San Jose and Houston and Orange County, Phong carries with her direct memories of war. She says she is haunted by a life that never has known stability--her 11-year-old daughter was born with a hole in her heart--and by the fire and gunmetal she saw in Vietnam.

“I paint in the Western style, but I am not painting about the Western world. They are very scary,” she says, referring to two wartime paintings, one depicting Vietnamese people fleeing, the other grief and terror on the face of an old woman.

Phong does not paint water buffalo or landscapes or rice paddies because, she says, they are Asian stereotypes, and, more important, such subjects ignore the war. She hopes that someday her work will fill “the hole in my heart.”

Howie Phan: Poet Still Rootless

Howie Phan, a poet, left Vietnam late, in 1991, wanting to understand American culture and to study literature. But the move, at first a dream of a simple life, made for an unexpected struggle to define himself. It has twice sent him back to Vietnam to reconcile “my two feet in two worlds.”

Phan, 30, is without roots among the rootless.

“I love this country. But I feel the distance every day,” Phan says. “I still struggle ... with the language. My identity. With relationships with people. That’s reflected in my writing.”

In Vietnam, he says, he no longer feels entirely Vietnamese, and when he is surrounded by Vietnamese people near his home in Orange County, he does not feel American either. The weight of it all is alleviated only when he writes.

He published a 1998 book--titled “Paradise of Paper Bells”--in Vietnamese that chronicles “the confusion. Chickens and ducks pecking on graves in Vietnam, and Charlie Parker and jazz.”

Phan says this, and sums up his life: “When I feel bad here, I think I still have another home I can go back to. I miss the country I left. But then I think, ‘What if it is just an illusion?’ ” he says. “I want two feet in one place.”

Dong and Hop Thi Nguyen: Portraits of Home

Dong Nguyen and Hop Thi Nguyen paint traditional Vietnamese art on paper and silk. They create landscapes and flowers and water buffalo.

As the La Palma couple, who are both in their 50s, see it, Vietnam’s history is a long arc of time, only a small portion of which was sullied by war. And so they embrace an idealism that keeps their memories of war and blood at bay. Sometimes, they say, people need to forget.

Her paintings mostly are of fine-featured Vietnamese women. They look like angels. Their mouths are tiny, with doll lips. The images are made of purples and yellows and shades of light green.

The couple spent four months in a refugee camp in Malaysia after leaving Vietnam in 1979. There, they both drew pictures with crayons and colored pencils, creating images of a life where fresh water was as rare as gold.

Hop Nguyen said, “When we see beyond the images of a brutal war, the hidden love appears in the bottom of everybody’s soul. I wish to portray this love in my work.”

Ham Tran: Film Symbolizes Feelings

The grandfather slept on a bed made of lacquered oak and lay his head on a block of cedar. The grandson would tickle him awake, and the pair would make their way into the garden, where they planted pomegranates.

Filmmaker Ham Tran was a little boy then. And that image of his dying grandfather is what the 26-year-old Santa Ana man uses as the fundamentals of his work as a filmmaker, piecing the fluttering and fragmented memories together into story and celluloid.

His film, called “Pomegranate,” is still a work in progress.

It is about how Asian men and boys interact, and war is layered below the surface, as context for the eventual separation of the two. After arriving in the U.S. in 1982, Tran never saw his grandfather again.

He says the film is a symbol of his feelings about Vietnam. When it is done, he hopes to show it at an Asian American film festival.

Tran also directs a theater group called Club o’ Noodles, whose signature play is titled “Laughter From the Children of War,” a series of sketches about being immigrants, Vietnamese, and descendants of people who lived through war.

Tran is the future of Vietnamese art here, a generation removed from war, a man who travels to a land he scarcely knows, importing what he can and creating art he hopes will change the association of Vietnam with war. “We have to move on,” he says. “Vietnamese Americans have now the task to change the world and their own perceptions of Vietnam, beyond just being victims of a war.”

Tran says he is searching an emotional past, and not the history of a country. Because, at his core, Tran says, he is a Vietnamese American, a blend that is wholly different from being exclusively one or the other.