Protesters Call Vietnamese Art Propaganda
By Janet Dang

A Vietnamese art exhibit in Santa Ana has brought about a torrent of protest from Vietnamese Americans who say the exhibit is a guise to spread communist propaganda.

Some 300 protesters, many of whom were among those who protested the hanging of a Ho Chi Minh poster and a North Vietnamese flag at a video store in Westminster, have picketed the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art since the exhibit opened there June 25.

The exhibit, titled A Winding River: Journey of Contemporary Art in Vietnam was organized by the Meridian International Center, a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., and features about 75 works by Vietnamese artists from the 1920s onward.

The effort behind the exhibit has been backed by both Vietnam and the United States. Deemed as the first-ever cultural exchange between Vietnam and the United States since the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the two countries, the exhibit has instead brought suspicion and anger to a community of former refugees.

For Duc Trong Do, president of the Vietnamese Community of Southern California, the exhibit is just another way for the Vietnamese government to “infiltrate into (their) community.”

“There is no freedom in Vietnam,” he said. “Nothing at all. How could we believe (the artists) can express their opinion? That’s why we cannot believe the communist government’s support of this art as freedom of expression. They are using and abusing art and culture as a tool for their propaganda.”

The protesters have attracted the support of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative group that helped sparked the debate over the art by burning the red Vietnamese flag and placing the ashes in a jar of urine -- a takeoff of Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Piss Christ,” a federally funded work that enraged conservatives because it depicted a crucifix in a jar of urine.

“Its the most disrespectful thing to do a country,” said Chad Morgan, president of the group’s Orange County chapter. “We think the communist flag represents the evils of communism and we want to show our disrespect for it.”

“To the Vietnamese who have suffered through communism, seeing this art produces the same effect that having to look at Nazi art would for Jews who suffered through the Holocaust,” said Darren Marks, California YAF state director.

Said Marks, who is Jewish: “It is important that Americans viewing this exhibit remember the evils of communism and the millions of people who have been murdered because of it.”

Janet Baker, curator of Asian art for the Bowers Museum and director of public programs, said curators who traveled to Vietnam to select the art had total freedom while visiting galleries there and were not required to receive permission from the Vietnamese government to remove the works. The art was borrowed from the artists themselves; from galleries such as the Singapore Museum of Art; and from private collections, including that of the Mobil Oil Co., which along with Coca Cola and the Kimsey Foundation helped underwrite the exhibit.

Baker insisted that at “no time was the Vietnamese government allowed to influence the decision as to which art was selected.”

“The best thing to do is not to ignore them (Vietnamese artists). We have to let the door be open and expose them, and slowly things will improve,” Baker said.

“People who fled Saigon in the mid ‘70s are very strongly anti- communistic. They’ll protest anything whether its a bag of rice imported from Vietnam or paintings,” she said.

Most of the works depict the life and landscape of Vietnam. But one piece showed a woman foraging steel, and on her lapel is an image of a red communist flag. Another piece shows a mother praying at an altar. On the wall are photos of soldiers, some of them appeared to be uniformed communists. One artwork, which featured four chairs on a red backdrop, was construed as a communist message: Protesters said the four chairs, two yellow ones, a white and a brown one were the different races united under communism.

To YAF state chairman Brian Park, a Korean American, “these paintings are communist propaganda.”

“The people viewing these paintings need to know that they were not authored in a society with freedom of expression, but under the command of the communist government,” he said.

Do clarified that he and others affiliated with him had no beef with the works themselves or the museum -- but rather the Vietnamese government’s support of the exhibit.

“We are not against the Bowers Museum. We are not against the Meridian International. We are not against the art, but the exhibit in which the communist government support. We are protesting against communism.”

“The point of view of Americans and visitors is that they have an open mind and an open heart,” Do said. “They don’t care if it’s communism propaganda. We are communist refugees. We cannot accept this.”

Baker said attendance at the exhibit is up more than 50 percent because of the protests. While a typical weekday afternoon might bring 100 to 125 visitors, she typically sees 175 to 200, she said.

The works have appeared in seven American cities, including St. Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif. The only other protest to date occurred this year at the Art Center in Plano, Texas.