42 CHICAGO READER | NOVEMBER 11, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Photography

By Kim Theriault

M ost of the events and exhi-bitions in the city’s ongo-ing Commit to Memory

exploration of the Vietnam warreflect familiar American atti-tudes rooted in the experiences ofthat time. But “Stages of Memory:The War in Vietnam” at theMuseum of ContemporaryPhotography offers somethingdifferent: the imaginative,thought-provoking perspectivesof six artists, all but oneVietnamese by birth, on issuesthat don’t necessarily spring tomind for Americans. What hap-pened to the Vietnamese as aresult of the war? Is their identitystill defined by it? What’s the rela-tionship between those still livingin Vietnam and its expatriates?

Internationally recognizedartist Dinh Q. Le—born inVietnam, raised in the UnitedStates, and now living in Ho ChiMinh City (formerly Saigon)—

brilliantlyaddressesthese ques-tions in hisseries“Persistenceof Memory,”which exam-ines the waypop-cultureimages ofVietnamhelped formhis identity.The titlecomes from aSalvador Dali

painting of the same name thatcombines representational imagesin surreal ways to reflect on thecreative process. In Persistence ofMemory #10 Le has woven a war-

era black-and-white image of sol-diers together with a colorfullandscape from a Hollywood filmabout the Vietnam war, reflectingthe commingling of his own realand imagined “memories.” Thehelicopters fighting wildfires nearhis California home, for example,

reminded him of those he’d seenin Vietnam. Then he rememberedthere were never helicopters in hisvillage—he was recalling scenesfrom Apocalypse Now. With itsfragments intricately woventogether in irregular patterns, thismosaiclike piece creates a visual

experience that fluctuates—likeLe’s memories—between sources,the black-and-white images burn-ing through the more familiarcinematic scene.

One of the most powerful worksin the show is Le’s video docu-mentation of an installation/per-

formance he did in the market inHo Chi Minh City. For DamagedGene Project he set up a stall thatsold clothing for deformed chil-dren—monogrammed with thenames of the chemical companiesthat produced defoliants—and

STAGES OF MEMORY: THE WAR IN VIETNAM MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY

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44 CHICAGO READER | NOVEMBER 11, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Photography

toys like two-headed dolls.Dioxin, used in Agent Orange,still contaminates Vietnamesesoil, and neither the U.S. nor theVietnamese government acknowl-edges that since the war there’sbeen a thousandfold increase inthe number of Vietnamese chil-dren born with birth defects.Damaged Gene Project confusedand often repulsed the people in the market, but despite the cultural stigma of deformities,some revealed, when pressed, that they knew or were related to a child born with one.

Like Le, Liza Nguyen, daugh-ter of a Vietnamese man whofled to France, returned toVietnam and recorded the war’s

lingering effects in physical andpolitical terms. “Surface” is madeup of banner-size photographs ofsoil samples from various well-

known war locations, such as MyLai. Greatly magnified, eachsample has its own texture andcolor, and you find yourself look-ing for some remnant of the war,

like Agent Orange or blood, amidthe rocks and twigs. Nguyen con-trasts her greatly enlargedimages of soil samples with small

snapshots of the monuments,billboards, and other propagan-da that constitute the currentVietnamese government’s “offi-cial” take on the war.

By contrast Howard HenryChen, born in Vietnam in 1972and raised in the United States,offers a glimpse of contemporaryVietnamese life: his photographsrecord his return to Vietnam as atourist last year. These seeminglyinnocuous vacation shots artfullycombine the colorful amusementparks and restaurants that arepart of Vietnamese culture todaywith images of Chen’s cousins whoremained in Vietnam. Throughthese vibrant, affectionate picturesof polychromed buildings andgates sprouting fake fruit Chenmuses on a life that might havebeen and challenges our concep-tion of Vietnam as a place thor-oughly devastated by the war: itnot only survives, it prospers.

Vietnamese-American BinhDanh uses the most unusualphotographic technique, recon-figuring well-worn war-era newsphotos he appropriates frommagazines or the Internet. Aftermaking negatives from theimages, he puts them on top ofleaves placed under glass andexposes them to sunlight, pro-ducing a shadowy image on thefoliage and essentially conflatingthe damage to those who suf-fered or died in the war and thedamage to the natural world.These ghostly figures are likespirits returned from the dead—as fleeting as memories.

Johnny Miller represents theAmerican point of view in KitBag: 1963-1971: My Father’sMemories From Vietnam, a col-lection of small photographs ofthe objects that his father usedwhile serving in the war. LikeTim O’Brien in his novel TheThings They Carried, Millerreminds us of the importance ofthe small objects soldiers had intheir possession, limited to whatwas easily portable. For Miller’sfather, these were items like ropeand a 1968 datebook—thoughwhat kind of pressing engage-ments a soldier might have in thejungle is left to the imagination.

Miller’s work may be intendedas a transition between “Stagesof Memory” and another exhibi-tion on the museum’s first floor,Jeffrey Wolin’s “InconvenientStories.” But Wolin’s photographsof veterans and texts of inter-views with them add nothingnew to the tale of Vietnam, sim-ply exploiting soldiers’ traumawithout offering anything worth-while artistically. The images arebland and uninventive, andthough the narratives are com-pelling, they get lost amid all theothers, just as Miller’s work doesamid the Vietnamese-centeredvisions in “Stages of Memory.”

Perhaps An-My Le, aVietnamese-American who at 45is the oldest of the artists here,best represents Americans’uneasy relationship to the war.Her series of large black-and-white photographs, “SmallWars,” documents reenactmentsof Vietnam battles in the woodsof South Carolina. Although Ledoesn’t appear to be sitting injudgment of adults playing sol-dier, the viewer is certainly left toquestion such activities, and towonder whether reenactments ofthe Vietnam war are any betteror worse than those of theRevolutionary and Civil wars. Allseem to stem from media glorifi-cation of combat. Small Wars(Lesson) is in part a self-portrait:Le sits with a “soldier,” a potentreminder that the war has hadvery real effects on many formore than 30 years. Unlikevisions of the Vietnam war thatonly look backward, “Stages ofMemory” focuses on its legacytoday, in the process dispellingfraudulent pop-culture imagesand forcing us to reexamine ourunderstanding of the war and ofmodern-day Vietnam. v

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Chen muses on a life thatmight have been andchallenges our conception of Vietnam as having beendevastated by the war.

CHICAGO READER | NOVEMBER 11, 2005 | SECTION ONE 45