‘Indochina: The Art of War’ Exhibition Misfires

“Indochina: The Art of War” is an inappropriately titled exhibition organized by artist Tran T. Kim-Trang for the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery’s program for independent curators. The show, selected by the gallery’s staff and its Artists Advisory Committee through a request-for-proposals process, has been installed at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Fine Arts Gallery because the Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park is currently being renovated.

Tran’s title, taken from Sun Tzu’s ancient military treatise, doesn’t fit her thematically consistent but conceptually disjointed seven-person exhibition. The works that most directly address the war in Vietnam are the least artistic, and those that are artistic have little to say about the war. The old battle between creativity and reportage gets the best of the show, which attempts to shoehorn two types of work into a format that does a disservice to both.

Fortunately, the stories told by some of the works are filled with so much heartbreaking sorrow and everyday heroism that they make you forget that you’re standing in a theatrically lit gallery at a lackluster theme-show.

Take, for example, a series of captioned photographs by William Short and Willa Seidenberg, a husband-and-wife, photographer-and-journalist team from Los Angeles. Their “Memories of the American War” pairs recent black-and-white portraits of Vietnamese men and women with unsentimental accounts of how the war changed their lives. One cluster shows Nguyen Thi Loc, her son Le Thanh Luong and the comfortable home they have built on the ruins of one destroyed in the December 26, 1972, bombing of Hanoi, which killed her husband and left her nine children fatherless.

Or Sheila Pinkel’s “Hmong in Transition,” a storyboard-like montage of color inkjet prints overlaid with quotes culled from interviews and letters. Focusing on Kou Chang, a Hmong refugee and guide whom Pinkel met on a trip to Thailand in 1990, the series of enlarged snapshots paints a bittersweet picture of uprooted lives as it follows Kou Chang and his family to Fresno in 1992 and on to North Carolina five years later, in search of better jobs.

Both documentary projects put a human face on the terror and tragedy of war. Most of the people in the pictures appear to be perfectly ordinary: If you met them on the street you’d pass by without batting an eye. The portraits are powerful because they make it extremely difficult to reconcile the ordinariness of the sitters with the extraordinary suffering they have endured. Without the background information provided by the texts, the intentionally unartistic pictures would have little resonance.

The rest of the works are too artistic to let you to forget you’re in a gallery. Although H. Lan Thao Lam’s library-like installation also follows a documentary impulse, it is insufficiently developed. Consisting of headsets that play taped interviews and copies of war-related articles laid out on tables, her work is overshadowed by its subject, its point of view too detached to generate empathy.

Likewise, diptychs by Hei Han Khiang are unresolved. Juxtaposing small snapshots of Cambodian amputees with larger, nearly abstract photographs of graduate student studios, they fail to establish a convincing link between their halves, whose pairing comes off as arbitrary if not exploitative. For its part, Hanh T. Pham’s mural-size display of more than 100 inkjet prints presents a landscape so generic it could be used as the backdrop for any number of print advertisements.

Dinh Q. Le’s works stand out because they stand on their own. Made of large C-prints he has cut into strips and woven together like grass mats, they make you feel as if you’re seeing double. Close-ups of Angkor Wat’s sculptural reliefs compete for your attention with anonymous portraits and decorative patterns. Bringing the distant past and the immediate present into a hallucinatory stew, Le’s multilayered images give form to a span of time so vast that single events--including devastating wars--play a small role.

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* “Indochina: The Art of War,” Luckman Fine Arts Gallery, California State University, 5151 State University Drive, L.A., (323) 343-6610, through Saturday. Closed Fridays and Sundays.