Coinciding with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s major exhibition “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975”, the most comprehensive show to date to examine the contemporary impact of the Vietnam War on American art, “Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past is Prologue” is an unprecendented exhibition presenting the Vietnam War from not only the artist’s personal perspective and history, but one that comes through the eyes of Vietnamese refugees in the United States.
Internationally acclaimed Vietnamese-American artist Tiffany Chung, born in 1969 in Đà Nẵng, Vietnam, finally makes visible a history hidden in plain sight for the past forty-five years, in a context that to date has given most weight to the sentiments of an American collective memory and experience of the war in Vietnam. Her contribution to the Smithsonian’s curatorial endeavour is invaluable and complementary to the American artists’ show, bringing to the fore the so far suppressed or unheard voices of those who personally lived the trauma of the war in their own country and had to leave their homeland.
Chung’s diverse, multimedia practice, which explores migration, conflict, and shifting geographies in the wake of political and natural upheavals, comes alive within the Smithsonian’s historic galleries in a show that probes the legacies of the Vietnam War and its aftermath curated by Sarah Newman, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art.
Presented in three sections, “Vietnam, Past is Prologue” features installations with maps, videos and paintings that highlight the voices and stories of former Vietnamese refugees, creating “an alternative story of the war’s ideology and its effects”, as the Smithsonian puts it. Chung has documented accounts that have been left out of official histories, while thoroughly researching archives that trace the worldwide migratory movements of Vietnamese refugees. The artist also brings in her own family history, through her father’s role in the war. As Holland Cotter has written in his New York Times‘ review of the exhibition, “here you see the personal and the political meet, which is extremely moving”.
In the press release, the Smithsonian writes about the show:
Vietnam, Past Is Prologue makes visible a history hidden in plain sight for the past forty-five years. Her subject, the War in Vietnam (1955–1975), has achieved a nearly mythic significance in the United States. In Vietnam, “the War” devastated life as it had been known, dividing time into a “before” and “after.” Yet missing from the narratives told by these two sides is the perspective of the South Vietnamese, on whose behalf the Americans entered the war. Through meticulously drawn and stitched maps, emotional interviews, and intensive archival research, Chung explores the experience of refugees who were part of the large-scale immigration during the post-1975 exodus from Vietnam. She begins with a fine-grained look into one person’s story—that of her father, who fought for the South Vietnamese military during the war, widens out to encompass the stories of former refugees from Vietnam, and pulls out further still to show the global effects of their collective migration in the war’s wake.
A speculative history of a man’s past
“Vietnam, Past is Prologue” begins with Remapping history: an autopsy of a battle, an excavation of a man’s past, which looks at Chung’s own family history and involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. The artist’s father was a helicopter pilot in the South Vietnamese Air Force, working alongside the American forces. During one of his dangerous missions in 1971, he was captured in North Vietnam, where he was held prisoner for 14 years. Meanwhile, her mother waited for his release at their home in Central Vietnam, with their daughters. After he was freed in 1984, he moved with the family to the United States, becoming a respected pastor in a large Vietnamese community in Texas. Expectedly, he rarely shared his experience in combat and captivity, therefore Chung tried to reconstruct the puzzle herself, putting together old photographs, searching for old maps and painting them in her own distinctive style, as well as creating a speculative history of her mother’s emotional life at the time and her own involvement.
Chung travelled to Vietnam, wearing the investigator’s hat and tracing her father’s steps, creating a detailed diagram of her discoveries with documentary materials that plotted her father’s movements and the major battles he was apparently involved in. In parallel, Chung presents an interspersed sequence of events that documents the artist’s own journey while piecing this history together. In the exhibition booklet, the curator writes:
Part historical timeline, part personal scrapbook, the installation asks in a visceral way whose stories get remembered and how individual memories intersect with larger recorded narratives. Anchored by established events, it explores most poignantly a daughter’s attempts to imaginatively recreate her father’s story.
Chung’s drawing and cartographic skills capture a violent history of suffering in a poetic way, displaying an aesthetic sensibility that goes hand in hand with her thorough research. Speaking with her back in 2017 when she presented this and other parts of the Vietnam Project in a gallery solo show at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, I mentioned to her Holland Cotter’s New York Times review of her exhibition there and his comment about how she could communicate something so engaged and so deep through beauty, writing: “As with tattoos, images that seem to be decoratively superficial are personal, political and ineradicable.” Chung then responded by quoting Benjamin Buchloh’s own statement in his Art Forum review of the 2015 Venice Biennale, in which Chung’s own maps from the Syria Project were on show. Buchloh wrote that “Chung now charts the forced movements of victimized populations and refugees, and of economically driven migration, pressing the epistemes of cartography and the diagram into service of the most productive project drawing could currently attempt.” Chung then told me:
The interdisciplinary approach in my practice can result in an overwhelming amount of research materials. And to transmit such knowledge and data to the potential audience through artworks is an intellectual and artistic negotiation – one cannot be without the other. Employing beauty and aesthetics to discuss very difficult subject matters has always been my strategy – using the universal language of art to draw people in first, only for them to be confronted with political issues or situations that they might not have been so willing to engage otherwise.
Focusing on her father’s combat experiences, the vividly coloured maps feature clusters of dots, arrows, blue rivers, other lines and a variety of symbols that together supposedly offer a full view of what went on, geographically, historically and strategically, but that without a clear guidance cannot really be understood nor interpreted. They are beautiful and enthralling to look at, and one could spend hours on them trying to make the most sense out of them. As Newman writes, “Maps promise certainty, clarity, legibility; complex terrain is distilled and simplified, made accessible to those who consult them.” However, she continues, although “Chung’s handmade maps of battles in the Vientam War seem at first to uphold this elementary assurance”,
Without a key for guidance, it is impossible to discern the meaning behind the precise markings, and any intial promise of clarity melts into trailing lines and blooming clouds of colour.
Specifically talking about An Lôc region-former airfields and rubber plantations, which maps the region in which Chung’s father operated during the war and depicts the intersection of French colonial infrastructure with that of 20th century battles, Newman writes:
The map clearly proclaims its historical and geographic specificity, but its significance is gleaned only in garbled whispers. Rather than convey one terrain, Chung attempts to communicate across gulfs of time and place, and in the face of deliberate suppression. … The places and events represented are searingly personal and historically significant, but the visual details are intentionally ambiguous. As much as anything else, the maps are documents of loss, speaking to the profound inaccessibility of the past.
The large diagram installation itself defies clarity in favour of a partly imagined, poetic account. Even in words the artist can be both blunt and lyric, writing about the result of her father’s participation in Operation Lam Son 719 in 1971 saying “His helicopter H-34 went down in flames/Hiding in a bunker”, while writing about her mother’s time spent alone waiting for his return by a riverbank is delicately expressed in poetry:
Walls of fog surrounded her tiny
frame, waiting and hoping for
my father to appear from the
other side through thick clouds
of mist. Or so she had hoped.
The curator eloquently writes about the work:
Like the maps it contains, Chung’s diagram delivers little of the desired clarity. Its most powerful contributions are poetic-imagined memories that substitute for a lost history. Chung’s attempts to connect with her father’s experience become a tantalizing memorial to an individual’s past, always just out of reach.
Hearing the Voices of the Exiled
As much as the first section is an intimate, speculative excavation of a man’s past, the second is an objective, yet deeply personal account of refugees’ experiences depicted through a series of screens displaying interviews with Vietnamese exiles. In his New York Times review of both exhibitions at the Smithsonian, Holland Cotter wrote that “if Ms. Chung had presented only one component of her complex show, a set of video interviews with an older generation of Vietnam refugees to the United States, that would by itself have been an invaluable contribution.” Indeed, through the personal portraits in Collective Remembrance of the War: voices from the exiles, Chung uncovers memories and histories that have been hidden or forgotten, but that are significant to both Vietnamese and Americans. The work is a collection of 21 videos presenting the stories of former refugees from Vietnam living in Houston, Texas, Orange County, California, and Falls Church, Virginia, whom the artist personally spoke to. The people in the videos recount some of the horrors of war, their experiences of hunger, death of dear ones and reeducation camps in Vietnam. They express their anger towards the Communist regime as well as about their treatment by their US ally.
In a personal conversation, Chung told me how it was an emotional endeavour for both herself, listening to the exiles’ stories, and the portrayed, who at times found themselves short for words, deeply moved and in contemplation of their memories of suffering. One interviewee from Houston, Texas, recounts:
The reason we fled in 1955 was because my father and my uncle, Pham Van Lan and Pham Van He, just finished their engineering degrees in France and came back to work at a mechanical firm in Hai Phong. One Sunday, my father and my uncle came to visit home from Hai Phong. My hometown was fifteen kilometers from Hai Phong, in a mixed military presence area. My father and my uncle stayed home that night. In the same night, VC guerrilla fighters came to take them away. I didn’t know what they questioned them about, but they came to the conclusion that my father and my uncle were spying for the French. And just because they studied in France, the guerrillas ordered for them to be killed; their bodies were put in burlap sacks and thrown into the river, which were carried by the current out to the sea and disappeared. A month later, it was my other uncle’s turn – because he went to a French school, he often read French newspapers, typically the Le Journal du Dimanche or the Paris Match. The guerrilla fighters came to search his house and saw those newspapers; I didn’t know what they were thinking but they said that those were traitorous documents. So, they also took my uncle, cut him in three pieces and threw them on the road at a T-junction; his body pieces were left there until rotten before they allowed his family to bury him.
Shown alongside the interviews in this section of the exhibition is Recipes of Necessity, a 2014 video in which a group of Vietnamese people who stayed in their country after the war sit around a dinner table, sharing their experiences of living through the Subsidy Period (1975–86), when the Vietnamese Communist government imposed ambitious political and economic reforms. Various memories arise, of struggles for food and necessities, and of navigating the new currency system that made their savings valueless. The conversation scenes are interspersed with ones of a dance inspired by their stories, choreographed and directed by Chung.
The testimonies and stories heard in the video portraits find an artistic, emotional counterpart in Chung’s lecture-performance, in which she recites, reading theatrically on stage, accompanied by a musician playing moving cello Bach suites. What she reads are people’s stories, history and emotions of the suffering and the war. One part goes:
Early 1970
He used to fly special missions and stay at a military base in the highlands. His first-born daughter was just a few months old then. Everyday he’d submit end-of-day reports to an officer in the U.S. Special Forces and they became good friends. One evening, he was singing at an officers’ club house; his American friend sat there and began to cry. They went outside to a dark place with no one around, and his friend cried even more:
“I am a patriotic soldier and I took an oath to be loyal to my country, the U.S. Therefore, I cannot reveal to you what my superiors have planned against you and your country; but I am crying for you.”
“I have several sons and now I don’t know what I’d teach them when they grow up about being patriotic.”
The Vietnam Exodus Project: a bird’s eye view
As if looking through a magnifying glass, and slowly taking it further away from her subject, first revealing a microcosm to gradually uncover a macro view of a much wider landscape, Chung closes the exhibition with a final section, The Vietnam Exodus Project: reconstructing history from fragmented records and half-lived lives. As Newman, writes, Chung widens “her focus from the singular to the collective, … transmuting personal memory into an expanded official history”. In this section, with maps, documents and watercolours, she helps us engage with history on a global scale.
The largest single map in the show, Reconstructing an Exodus History: flight routes from camps and of ODP cases hangs twelve-feet-long across a single wall. The world map, with a navy blue background and delicately embroidered scarlet escape routes, represents the forced migration of Vietnamese people by plane from refugee camps in Asia and through the ODP (Orderly Departure Program) to worldwide locations 35 years ago. In one single glance, we can see how far the Vietnamese moved across the globe after the war.
All the information Chung gathered to make this, as well as other maps, come from thorough research. A major source that determined much of her tracing the steps of refugees around the globe is the UNHCR (United Nations Hugh Commissioner for Refugees) in Geneva. In the centre of the gallery are some of these documents she collected at the UNHCR. Here, Chung has spent a significant amount of time researching documents, such as correspondence cables and records from goverment and intragovernmental agencies that dealt with the refugees from Vietnam. She coupled these investigations with information gathered from direct interviews with resettled people in places as far as Africa. Chung was thus able to make sense of some incomplete and fragmented documents, and understand the breadth of the Vietnamese migration, and her people’s resettlements in unexpected places like Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. She mapped these escape routes like in a flight map one can find in inflight magazines, but its significance goes beyond the mere geographical function, to encompass the historiographic one, all the while conserving its main aesthetic value of a meticulousily executed work of art.
In this last gallery, across from the world map, is the Vietnam Exodus History Learning Project, which includes a series of watercolours made in 2017 by young Vietnamese artists in Ho Chi Minh City, commissioned by Chung. The paintings are based on photographs of the refugee crisis in the late 1970s and 1980s, a period of their own history that these artists have not known, nor heard much about. By letting them paint these images, Chung allows them to recover their past and fill in the blanks of a history half told. The images are poignant, with boats full of refugees, one almost capsizing, people in refugee camps that look like prisons, and children looking at the viewer with vacant eyes.
From Syria to Vietnam and beyond: tracing global migration
In 2017, and following an earlier, smaller presentation at Art Basel in Hong Kong in 2016 with Tyler Rollins Fine Art, Chung presented her project on Vietnam’s refugees and migration in a gallery solo show at TRFA in New York, titled “the unwanted population”. The Vietnam Exodus Project followed an earlier one, the Syria Project, which spoke of Syria’s major contemporary migration crisis. At the time of the New York show, I spoke with Chung, trying to understand how her work on migration had developed over the years, leading from her own personal experience. She told me:
In regards to conflict and disaster induced migration, it is really old news. Going back to the Old Testament of the Bible and looking at maps of ancient times, we see people migrated for various reasons: from fleeing conflicts, persecution and torture, to exploring economic opportunities. Painfully, a great part of our human history is written through colonial and imperialistic ambitions of conquering and exploiting new lands, notably the global south. My own personal experience as a refugee living through war and the nightmares of its aftermath plays an ineradicable role of shaping my interest in world geopolitics and refugee migration.
Chung today recounts how it all somehow started in 2009, when she worked on a project that looked at several important conflicts of the 20th century:
In 2009, I worked on ‘scratching the walls of memory’, a project that examined the Cold War through a number of important conflicts that shaped the 20th century, including the war in Vietnam. I always try to study a refugee migration movement by unpacking the root cause of it. Understanding the Vietnam conflict within a global context also created some distance and objectivity needed in tackling a war so close to home. Little did I know, emotions still ran deep. After presenting the project in 2010, I put the Vietnam conflict and its aftermath on hold until 2014. While working on the Syria Project (2012-ongoing), I realized the reason I was obsessed with the Syrian humanitarian crisis was because it bore some striking resemblances to the Vietnamese refugee crisis: the colonial history, the convoluted civil war turning into a proxy war – a new Cold War if you like, and the toll it takes on the population.
Of course what has been going on in the Middle East is also complex in other aspects, but the Vietnam experience is mirrored to an extent – in the human tragedies and the policies. Tracking the conflict in Syria has enabled me to return to and embark on a much more comprehensive project that re-discovers, studies and maps the post-1975 Vietnamese exodus – on asylum policies (the Hong Kong Chapter), as well as the scope and scale of this migration to the unexpected regions of the global south (reconstructing an exodus maps.) After launching the Vietnam Exodus Project, I’ve also returned to confronting the Vietnam conflict through a number of projects, with the most recent being “Vietnam, Past Is Prologue”, my [current] solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (15 March – 02 September 2019.)
It is interesting to know how Chung worked on her Syria Project to better understand how her work developed into the Vietnam Exodus Project. The Syria case is the one which most people today can personally connect to, as it is the most recent and is a part of our contemporary life, affecting our everyday experiences. I asked Chung about her personal involvement in the Syrian refugee crisis and her own personal experience with it as well as her work with refugees:
It’s been 44 years since the post-1975 Vietnamese refugee crisis started, so there are a lot of literature and materials on this history for us to analyse and learn from. I could access vast volumes of files and documents during my research at the UNHCR in Geneva – as the policy is that it takes twenty years for certain records to be declassified and released for research purposes. Moreover, people have had time to process and are ready to speak out about their experiences. I was able to talk to the former refugees while doing fieldwork and tap into their personal and collective memories of the war and the exodus.
With the case of Syria, the war is still going on. The wounds are still fresh in people’s hearts. It’d be insensitive and even disrespectful to ask questions. Therefore, I approach the Syria Project from two different angles – tracking the conflict and humanitarian crisis while examining asylum policies that have emerged in Europe. I then compare them with those of the Vietnamese refugee era, in hope of understanding the impacts of such policies on the refugee populations, then and now.
Moreover, I want to be useful by really getting involved, given the urgency of the current situation – whether through financial donations, connecting the ones in needs of legal advice to the right people, or just simply listen to their concerns and struggles. I’ve worked with refugee children in a project called Travelling with Art, a collaboration between Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark with a Danish Red Cross school, which has been running for 15 years now. I’ve formed friendship and stay in regular contact with some of the young Syrians through this program.
Focusing closer to home, I asked Chung how her own personal history influenced her choice of addressing such issues, and why, now that years have passed since the Vietnam ‘exodus’, has she chosen to speak about it and bring attention to it once more. She replied:
The Vietnam experience was too personal, too close to my heart, and for years I was just simply not ready to confront it. I needed the time to process my family’s turbulent time during the war and the trauma of its aftermath. History is often written by the regime in power – the erasure of other people’s histories is systematic in the case of Vietnam. This kind of politically driven historical amnesia has become a force that drives my work, to protest the political narrative produced through statecraft. The generation that experienced the war and the exodus first hand are either aging or dying, so recording such oral histories feels more urgent than ever. With the experience I’ve accumulated from unpacking other global conflicts, I finally feel more capable of studying the war and the Vietnamese exodus history with objectivity, clarity, and even distance in order to get the work done.
However, the situation in Syria is a matter of urgency, here and now. As we continue to witness how the war indiscriminately crushes and grinds the country, I address such issues in my work because I can and because it’s almost unimaginable not to do anything. The war in Vietnam has shaped and informed the new Cold War, with Syria being its second major theater. It’s crucial to bring back the Vietnam experience at this point in time to remind us that past is prologue. Without remembering and learning from the past, history will continue to repeat itself, times and again.
Chung also revealed what kind of research process she has followed in order to shed more light on this important moment in our global history:
My research process employs two types: one is academic research and the other ethnographic fieldwork. The academic research encompasses literature on a specific crisis, with scholarly studies, media & NGOs’ reports and archival records that could help me to analyze and reconstruct a particular history. The UNHCR in Geneva is one of the places that I would have to go to in order to collect the records on the Vietnamese refugees. In ethnographic research, I collect stories and materials from people, whether through social media or in real life. For the Hong Kong Chapter of the Vietnam Exodus Project, I spent about three years going to Hong Kong back and forth. I met and became part of a Vietnamese community there. The ‘participant’s observation’ method was proven effective without my asking direct questions. People eventually shared their stories and some even asked me to record their journeys.
Launching the first part of this chapter at Art Basel HK in 2016 subsequently opened more doors for this project, as key players in the past saw the exhibition and approached me to share their experience of either working with or supporting the former refugees. I was able to establish working relations with several Hong Kong based human rights lawyers that had worked with the late Pam Baker in the ‘80s and ‘90s during the Vietnamese refugee era. With the support of Spring Workshop and Tai Kwun, we then organized three panel discussions, tackling a number of key policies embodied in the lived experiences of the former Vietnamese refugees through their own testimonies, the work of Hong Kong’s NGOs such as “Art in Camp” and of the human rights lawyers assisting Vietnamese asylum seekers in the past in gaining refugee status, and the work of two Danish organizations in their efforts of helping current asylum seekers in Denmark.
Chung’s interest in migration is manyfold and encompasses a much wider history, ultimately colliding in her ongoing Global Refugee Migration Project, of which we might soon see new perspectives:
In between the two specific case studies of the Vietnamese and Syrian refugee crises, the Global Refugee Migration Project (2015-ongoing) has emerged as an inevitable component to chart the movements of refugees globally. Currently based in Houston, a flight hub that connects the U.S. to Latin America, I’ve expanded my research to cover migration from Central America, focusing on Guatemala as a case study. The Guatemala Project aims to excavate layers of history, notably the U.S. involvement in Guatemala economically and politically, its 36-year civil war and state’s oppression, and its continuous violations of human rights.
C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia
“Tiffany Chung: Vietnam, Past is Prologue” is on view from15 March to 2 September 2019 at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC.