Illuminating Vietnam
After years of planning and international
cooperation, two major exhibitions in the U.S. and
Europe promise to open up the history and culture
of Vietnam in an entirely new way
HANOI & NEW YORK - In the tunnel of international memory, Vietnam
occupies a small, mostly dark space--one filled with the
sights of war and lit only here and there with brighter
images of paddies and peasants in conical hats. Now a
major new exhibition is about to try and breathe life and
air into this tunnel with an expansive, often playful, look
at today's Vietnam.
Opening later this month, "Vietnam: Journeys of Body,
Mind and Spirit," at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, will show colourful traditional
objects from Vietnam--water puppets, votive offerings,
zodiac figures--and combine them with multimedia
presentations to illustrate the lives of ordinary
Vietnamese.
The show, which has been put together with the
Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi, marks a
turning point for a country long absent from the global
museum circuit. And it's just the first of two exhibitions
that promise to give overseas audiences an
unprecedented glimpse into the country. Later in the
year, Belgium's Royal Museums of Art and History will
host an exhibition of around 400 historical artefacts
from Vietnam, most of which come from Vietnamese
museums.
Both shows are important for Vietnam. At home, the
opportunity to work alongside Western curators looks
likely to influence how Vietnam's underfunded cultural
institutions mount future exhibitions and conserve their
collections. Overseas, the shows represent an attempt
by Vietnam to rehabilitate its image among the
international community.
"I think it will serve as one factor that makes U.S.
citizens understand more about Vietnam," says Truong
Quoc Binh, a deputy general director at the Culture
Ministry in Hanoi, who adds it will also show Vietnam
is "neither an aggressive country nor a backward
country."
But as with any exhibition on this scale, key decisions
have had to be made about what to include--and what
to leave out. Already, some have questioned whether
the exhibition glosses over ethnic tensions in Vietnam.
And then there's the question of whether an exhibition
really can permanently alter perceptions of a country.
Four years in the making, "Vietnam: Journeys of Body,
Mind and Spirit" marks the first time that Vietnamese
and American museums have collaborated in mounting
an exhibition. The opening of this landmark show later
this month has prompted at least nine New York
galleries to mount their own shows of modern painting,
printing, performance and photography from
Vietnam--spurring talk of a "Vietnam Spring."
Suitably, the main exhibition opens with images of
Vietnam's springtime Tet festival, with images of cyclists
lugging peach-blossom branches. It's the start of a vivid
multi-sensory, multi-media experience for visitors. The
curators have assembled everything from wood
carvings to textiles and ceramics to puppets, backed up
by photographs and videos that show how such objects
permeate everyday life. There's even Vietnamese food
for sale in the lobby. "What we're doing is working with
living tradition," says curator Laurel Kendall at the
department of anthropology at the American Museum
of Natural History.
That includes the traditions of Vietnam's 53 ethnic
minority groups and the majority Kinh group. Rituals
such as weddings, funerals, and adolescent initiation
rites are explored through individual stories. And while
more than two-thirds of Vietnamese live in the
countryside, curators have also focused on life in the
cities to get people thinking "beyond the paddy field,"
Kendall explains.
To put it all into context, there's a hefty 272-page
collection of essays by Vietnamese and foreign scholars
that generally avoids slipping into the dogma pit. The
communist leadership is given credit for allowing a
resurgence of ritual practices suppressed during
wartime, but faulted for forcing many Vietnamese into
gruelling re-education camps after 1975. "In many
cases, their potential to contribute productively and
positively to Vietnam's development was overlooked
and largely wasted," notes anthropologist Oscar
Salemink.
Some of those people and their families later fled to the
United States. The big question is how these diverse
overseas ethnic-Vietnamese communities will respond
to the exhibition. No one has forgotten the violence that
marred a March 2000 show in California where artist
and Vietnam War veteran C. David Thomas displayed
35 silk lithograph portraits of Ho Chi Minh. Protesters
lined up with megaphones shouting "Down with the
communists!" and angrily labelled anyone who went
inside a "traitor." A glass door pane was smashed.
To ward off such confrontations, the New York
museum has been trying to reach out to the community
with the help of ethnic Vietnamese like Dao Spencer,
who has worked on refugee resettlement and on
improving U.S.-Vietnamese relations. She says most
Vietnamese in the U.S. will welcome the exhibition as
long as it avoids communist propaganda. "I think many
will come to look. It's a trip back in nostalgia," she
says. Could a core of protesters still pop up? "If they
want to create trouble, we can't avoid it. But we're not
trying to provoke it intentionally." The advisers also
helped sift through wartime photographs to avoid any
offensive display. While the show doesn't focus on the
war, "an exhibit that pretended the war never happened
would be fake," says Kendall. Thus, one of the
journeys described is the wandering of "lost
souls"--Vietnamese who weren't properly buried. A
small, dedicated area recalls all the war dead, including
Americans.
But old war wounds could prove less controversial than
contemporary issues: The exhibition has already
sparked criticism by omitting reference to the February
2001 protests by ethnic minorities angry at
land-grabbing and suppression of religious gatherings.
The unrest ended in heavy jail sentences for some
protesters. "There are still some very sensitive issues,
on both sides. So we have to choose what to present
and what to say," concedes Nguyen Van Huy, director
of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology and co-curator of
the show. He adds that the show has tried to strike a
fair balance in presenting Vietnam's three geographical
regions.
In Hanoi, Huy shows how his museum's staff have
benefited from contact with the American conservators.
The Vietnamese say they learned how to dust objects
properly, keep textiles away from direct contact with
metal racks, systematically tag items, and pack them to
avoid breakage. But perhaps the most important lesson
involved the value of doing thorough field research to
unearth the human stories behind the inanimate objects.
The show should deliver long-term benefits for
conservation back in Vietnam. But will it help shine up
the country's image overseas? Alan Feinstein, who was
based in Jakarta in 1990 with the Ford Foundation
when it was helping fund the Festival of Indonesia in the
U.S., is cautiously optimistic. "I think the Festival of
Indonesia changed a lot of people's perceptions, and
made them think about Indonesia in different ways," he
says. While many Americans had equated Indonesia
with Balinese culture, the festival shattered the
stereotype by showcasing arts from other ethnic
groups, he explains.
Feinstein feels such shows potentially have "the power
to expand people's knowledge and give a more
nuanced view." But, he admits, "I think it's a very hard
thing to measure."
Still, Huy is at least happy to get a chance to let
Vietnamese tell their stories through the exhibition. And
in that spirit, he gladly provided his own wedding
photo, along with home videos of his family celebrating
Tet. After all, he has been collecting artefacts from
villagers for years. Says Huy: "If I felt shy about
introducing my real life, how can I expect others to
show me theirs?"
Vietnam : journeys of body, mind and spirit
From March 15 at the American Museum of Natural
History, New York (www.amnh.org). In 2005, the
show will move to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology,
Hanoi
By Margot Cohen - The Far Eastern Economic Review - March 06, 2003.
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