Hanoi and New York museums set 2003 show
An exhibition of Vietnamese culture in the
early 21st century billed as the first
comprehensive show on Vietnamese life to be
presented in the United States will come to
the American Museum of Natural History in
the spring of 2003, the museum announced
yesterday in Hanoi.
The exhibition, "Vietnam: Journeys of Body,
Mind and Spirit," is to be jointly presented by
the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi.
Ellen V. Futter, Museum of Natural History
president, said she expected that the show
would give Americans a look at Vietnam that
they have never seen.
"Even more than the objects themselves is a look at Vietnam, which I
think will surprise Americans," she said. "Their last images of Vietnam
are of the war. To see Vietnam postwar will be enlightening. It's been
30 years since Americans have seen images of Vietnam."
The exhibition is to include about 300 objects, among them ceramics,
textiles, wooden sculptures, lanterns and water puppets, which are
puppets manipulated under water with bamboo poles. The exhibition
will also feature photographs and video scenes of daily life in Vietnam.
"From an ethnographic perspective, the exhibition will present the daily
life of Vietnamese people in the north, the center and the south of the
country, in cities as well as the countryside, in the delta as well as the
mountains and highlands," Dr. Nguyen Van Huy, Vietnam Museum of
Ethnology director, said in a statement. "It will show that Vietnam is a
diversified culture of more than 50 ethnic groups, all of which are
respected and nurtured."
The war will appear in the exhibition to the extent that it affected
everyday life in Vietnam portrayals of death rituals and the problem of
retrieving war dead. Such cultural examination of the impact of the war
has never before been undertaken collaboratively by organizations in
Vietnam and the United States, Ms. Futter said.
Dr. Huy and Dr. Laurel Kendall, curator of Asian Ethnographic
Collections at the Museum of Natural History, are co-curators of the
exhibition. "The collaboration is historic," Ms. Futter said. "This is the
first time cultural institutions from America and Vietnam have gotten
together since the war. It is the first introduction, or reintroduction, of
Vietnamese culture to America."
The Museum of Natural History developed a relationship with the
Vietnam Museum in its efforts to help preserve biodiversity. In 1997,
the American Museum of Natural History Center for Biodiversity and
Conservation, under the directorship of Dr. Eleanor Sterling, initiated a
collaborative project in Vietnam that included the American Museum of
Natural History, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Institute of Ecology
and Biological Resources in Hanoi and the Vietnam National University
in Hanoi. In 1998, the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology sponsored part of
the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation's Vietnam project.
By Robin Pogrebin - The New York Times - March 20, 2002.
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