Eleven Nguyens and the Thirty-Year Loss at PH Gallery
Sarah Murkett
April 30th passed quietly this year, an anniversary largely unnoticed in the American media. In commemoration of the surrender of South Vietnam to the Vietcong, April 30th, 1975, the PH Gallery in New York invited eleven Nguyens to execute pieces concerning this day, thirty years later. Organized around this common name and date, the assembled projects are surprising in their range?some abstract the war, others appropriate Western tropes; some document horrors, others stage explosions. These eleven incarnations of memory and invented memory teach us the importance of reflection, the insidiousness of repetition, and the power of authorship.
Dustin, an illustrator, offers a scene of himself as a young boy on a boat with his family, fleeing Vietnam. Christian reproduced a photo taken on April 30th, 1975 of the helipad at the American embassy in Saigon, and eliminated the helicopters and evacuees in the translation. Han scrawls and scratches the passing years since the unification into the emulsion of a photograph of his torso, symbolically and physically incorporating this story into his body. Cat Tuong stages mock explosions using firecrackers and images from media sources, producing new scenes of havoc and destruction. Liza presents a series of 84 postcards of the war-torn Vietnamese landscape. For this exhibition she sent one of these postcards from her native France using stamps that honor the 50th anniversary of the French soldiers who died defending French sovereignty in Indo-china at Dien Bien Phu. Trong presents a birthday cake in the colors of the Vietnamese Flag, a pastry made for his friend Warn Defever, whose nickname "War" derived from his date of birth, April 30th, 1969.
Political dialogue is a necessary component of awareness and is often a first step in the catalyst for change. Many of these projects allude to the negative effects of the American involvement in Vietnam. They stimulate dialogue; they do not act directly to rally an apathetic culture. An exception to this is Pipo?s collaborative project A Motorcycle for Bi. Pipo met and befriended Bi, a rickshaw driver, in 2001 during his first trip to his native Vietnam since 1975. Documented here as a photograph and project outline, Pipo will return and replace Bi?s failing rickshaw with a brand new motorbike. In an act of symbolic unification Pipo will travel as Bi?s first fare from the Southern tip to the Northern most point of Vietnam. At the end of the trip Bi will go home with money in his pocket and a motorized bike that will allow him to make more money for his family and work less hours. Now that is real change effected on a grassroots level. But now the question is, is it art?
