CEPA: ReLocating Asia Gallery

As a third generation Japanese American born in Hawaii, and a curator, writer, and visual artist involved with issues of identity for over a decade, I have sought to illuminate how contemporary Asian American artists from a broad range of heritages contend with how they see themselves, and with how others see them, in a nation and a world where things Asian are becoming far more visible. While I believe it is necessary to be aware of theoretical concerns in order to better understand how artworks are framed and shaped by broader societal, cultural, and historical pressures, I am also deeply concerned with the fact that art is a product of individual agency, a product, moreover, that always has an "address." As such, it must be recognized that art -- especially art explicitly dealing with identity -- not only comes from someone, but someone who has come from somewhere. To meet the challenges inherent in understanding how art addressing identity functions, and in assessing the significant impact that personal experience can have, I believe an examination of individual motivation and intentionality is crucial. Thus I have long found it necessary to enter into an extensive dialogue with an artist prior to writing about their work. Among the many significant Asian American artists I have had ongoing dialogues with over the years is Hanh Thi Pham, a woman born in Vietnam, who is creating a memorable body of images addressing difficult issues of displacement, ethnicity, and gender. Works that speak directly to issues of power and domination, to the Vietnamese experience of America, and, at the same time, allow the artist to find new, often highly charged ways of re-imagining herself as an Asian woman in the American public arena.

For many Vietnamese and Americans, the failure of America's involvement in Vietnam, and the decades-long exodus following the collapse of South Vietnam, a nation created and erased by the cruel imperatives that characterized the global ideological and military competition of the Cold War, continue to resonate. Not only is there now a large postwar Vietnamese diaspora scattered around the world, including over 800,000 in the United States alone, but given the extent to which enmities long held sway, it wasn't until 1995, over twenty years after the last American troops departed Vietnamese soil, before full diplomatic relations between America and a unified Vietnam could be established. Therefore, it should be no surprise that many who lived through decades of increasingly vicious warfare, and were subsequently forced to suddenly begin again as strangers in an alien land, would remain preoccupied with a host of often contentious matters arising from the sudden loss of the cultural context for one's life and work. Indeed, like quite a few of her compatriots, Hanh Thi Pham found herself compelled to grapple with lingering, unresolved connections with the place and society of her birth; and with pressures related to simultaneously having to position oneself within the complexities of American's multicultural society, as well as within a reconstituted Vietnamese American community that continued to mirror many of the deep post-colonial political schisms and traditional social expectations of Vietnamese society.

Born in 1954, the year that the French, who had colonized Vietnam in the nineteenth century, were finally expelled, Hanh Thi Pham became an involuntary witness to decades of unremitting warfare between her countrymen, and the corrosive impact of the massive American intervention. Fleeing to America following the fall of her homeland to the communists in 1975, Pham, along with her family, joined the desperate exodus fleeing Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), the capital of what had been the Republic of South Vietnam. Settling in California, where over half of all Vietnamese in America now live, Pham studied photography, not only to support herself, but also as a means to come to terms with the indelible memories of that violent era. Yet Pham, as a Vietnamese, a woman, and an open lesbian, was soon made to realize that others -- in Southeast Asian refugee neighborhoods where many objected to her reenactments of hostilities over the legacy of the war, and among various Americans who expected Asians, particularly women, to take a subservient position in their dealings -- were often infuriated by her efforts. Stung by reactions from the more conservative members of her community who insisted that a "Vietnamese woman is not supposed to say things in public," Pham determined that in the realm of sexuality and art, at least, she would never again allow herself to be suborned by others' demands. Defiantly asserting that in this nation, "I will self-govern myself," the artist challenges the forces that aspire to render her invisible, by solidly implanting her image at the center of overtly confrontational photography-based work.

Since the early 1980s, in a series of far-ranging, semi-autobiographical photographs increasingly incorporating charged self-imagery and self-referential texts, the artist has confronted what it has meant for her to have spent much of her adult life in situations that required her to traverse or transgress a series of external boundaries -- political, cultural, and social. Whether those crossings were involuntary, due to catastrophic circumstances beyond her control, or willful acts of contravention, by unambiguously counterposing her own iconoclastic conceptions of shifting ethnic and gendered selfhood, Hanh Thi Pham seeks through her art to vigorously challenge the dominant mores and social institutions of both modern American and traditional Vietnamese culture.

Since limited space does not permit an extended examination of the artist's work over the last fifteen years, in this short essay I will foreground a few key pieces whose themes are echoed by much of the art in this exhibition. Pham's work has followed a trajectory which first emphasized the traumatic impact of the Vietnam War, both on a personal level and in how it affected Vietnamese refugee communities in America, and then, increasingly, moved on to far more self-focused ruminations on her sexuality and intimate relationships, which have been mediated through race, cultural differences, and unequal power relations.

In earlier pieces, such as the Post Obit series, 1983, and the related Along the Street of Knives, 1985, Pham directly confronted the discomfort she experienced over separation from her homeland. In a particularly poetic passage, one of six images from the Post Obit series, Pham suggests the extent of her sense of profound isolation and displacement as a Vietnamese forced to live among Americans, by citing a recurrent dream she had at the time in which she saw herself "as a ghost, going home." Yet in this uneasy vision the artist found that her ties with the past remained unalterably severed. Through a poignant image reminiscent of the Western biblical story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, Pham depicts herself naked, as an unsettled spectre desperately attempting to return to a Vietnam that no longer exists. Even as she struggles to open the door that would finally allow her to reenter her childhood home, her spirit is utterly rebuffed by invisible forces that would eternally cast her back into a realm of unrelenting darkness and chaos. In a conjoined motif, the artist depicts her ghost in traditional Vietnamese dress attempting to kneel before her family's Buddhist altar, even as the shrine falls apart before her eyes. As Pham puts it, in this dark vision the "picture of her [my spirit's] grandfather disappears, the fruit and candles fell off, and everything becomes so nightmarish."

Since, according to Pham, people in America "don't want to talk about the Vietnam War but I want to do something to wake them up," within two years she began work on Along the Street of Knives, 1985, a series of color photographs based on still vivid memories of a childhood lived during decades of conflict, military as well as cultural. In this series of performative, loosely autobiographical tableaux vivant, Pham employs her own image and that of white California sculptor Richard Turner, who had lived in Vietnam as a teenager, as stand-ins for their respective societies. Pham "staged" these pieces to foreground, from dual vantage points, the sort of attitudes -- mutual voyeurism, incomprehension, and "secret hatred for each other" -- that all too often typified relations between Vietnamese and Americans during that period.

Evening Stroll/Night Patrol, a piece in this series, portrays an American couple who, like a pair of touristic "peeping toms" seeking out a glimpse of something they could consider authentically exotic, surreptitiously peer into the window of a Vietnamese home. In this vision of crosscultural misunderstanding and contrary expectations, the young Asian girl they glimpse within not only sees them and solidly meets their gaze, but, motivated by a desire to present them with something prototypically American that she believes they would be pleased to see in an alien place, she holds up a Mickey Mouse doll. For Pham, this ironic image was meant to convey the fact that "there was a definite gap between these two worlds, these people didn't know much about each other." In another of these works, Reconnaissance/Cai nha nay nha cua ta (This House is My Own House), the roles have been reversed. Here the artist, in the guise of a young child grasping a toy rifle, spies on foreigners in their homes and reacts with a blend of fascination and bitterness at what she discovers within: a mixed-race American couple, both black and white, living in a luxurious villa adorned with the skin of a Vietnamese tiger. Having viewed most Americans she met in Vietnam as self-absorbed and blandly indifferent to the fate of her people -- akin to big game hunters and tourists coming to her homeland for sport and entertainment -- Pham found herself, as an adult in America, finally able to give clear voice to her youthful resentment over their very presence. As she recounts, "It allowed me to feel that I have shed something so now the burden is less."

With Expatriate Consciousness (Khong la nguoi o), 1991-92, a complex piece composed of interrelated photographs and text, Pham began to assert that she would never again allow anyone to reduce her complex sense of self... to a simplistic "pretty picture" whose sole purpose was to reflect some Westerner's fantasy of compliant Asians. In this wide-ranging project, loosely conflating elements of familial history, autobiography, references to her sexuality, and signs of external imposition in her homeland (French, American, as well as Communist), Pham sought to assert "the real thing that a Vietnamese person is about: not erotic, or anything for you [i.e., Westerners], but about hatred for those years that were so damaging."

In one section, Expatriate Consciousness No. 9, 1991-92, Pham seeks to deflect presumptions that a "Vietnamese woman is not supposed to say things in public." Here, she depicts herself bare-chested, with arms defiantly raised in a profane gesture before a defaced, inverted image of Buffalo Bill Cody, a figure closely associated with America's westward expansion to the Pacific Ocean and, ultimately to East Asia, during the nineteenth century. For one whose primary conception of America remains based on memories of numerous Hollywood films, the marring of this archetype of the American cowboy is a warning that she is not an Asian who would passively accept Westerners' notions of superiority. To reinforce this message, in a side panel Pham includes a segment of a phrase in Vietnamese that she translates as "not as your servant," a direct reference to the lowly jobs her grandmother had to take with foreigners to support her family in Indochina, under French rule. As the artist proclaims, "I become my grandmother in this life, in this generation... whereas she never revolted I will fight back, so watch out."

With Lesbian Precepts, an intricate, mixed-media installation from 1993, Pham, to "revolt against the symbology in traditions where god has to be a man," arrogates to herself the authority vested in the supreme image revered by traditional Vietnamese culture, that of the Buddha. At the same time, because the French colonial rulers of her homeland imported a god -- also portrayed as male -- and many Vietnamese are now Roman Catholic, for the artist, this installation is intended as a sharp, double-edged rebuke, as she put it, "a sign of utter revolt against the iconography of Christian god/Buddha." Frustrated with the predominance of religious traditions, both in Asia and the West, that perpetuate male authority and privilege by foregrounding masculinized imagery, and inspired by a belief that the Buddha once took feminine form to teach the populace, Pham began to question why the Buddha is not shown as a female. Rather than jettison a heritage that she still finds meaningful, she chose to refashion it in her own image.

Conceived as a personal altar, with a hierarchical visual architecture incorporating photographs, interrelated texts, and pseudo-liturgical objects, Pham phrases Lesbian Precepts in complex codings of her own invention simulating Buddhist iconography. Supplanting the male deity, she presents her self-image as the central focus of the piece: seated nude, legs folded in a lotus position associated with teaching, and with both hands in mudra-like positions, conventionalized gestures used to convey the Buddha's teachings. Above her head a highly magnified microscopic image of her vaginal fluid, a sovereign expression of her inner self floats like a glistening halo. Proclaiming that "here, I am bigger than Buddha," the artist signals her supremacy by placing a small wooden statue of the Buddha, a gift from her mother, at the self-portrait's feet.

Adjoining the figure of the artist, an array of inscriptions, in Vietnamese and English, articulates a private cosmology with new Lesbian Precepts that for Pham, are a worthy alternative to the Five Precepts of Buddhism. Part of the Noble Eightfold Path, the basis of day-to-day Buddhist practice, the Five Precepts, as an expression of Right Action, are guidelines for ethical conduct which the artist compares to the Ten Commandments. Whereas this ancient code emphasizes values like refraining from drinking alcohol, lying, and indulging in "irresponsible" sexual behavior, Pham, who follows a very non-traditional path, recasts the precepts -- emphasized by bywords like sex, language, tongue, self governance, lesbian -- to accord with her desire, and likewise inspire contemporary women to take control of their lives and their sexuality. Moreover, because Vietnamese has no specific term for 'lesbian,' the artist coined a special expression for this piece, (that she says derives from a compound word that can ironically be read as "woman who love[s]" in one configuration, and as "bad" or "demon" woman in another).

Lesbian Precepts presaged several themes which have come to occupy a central position in Pham's latest work. One is that of gender crossing, or as she puts it, "transsexual" identity. Maintaining that there is a male aspect to her persona which she has come to recognize as having always existed within her, and which she increasingly embraces, she professes that: "Even if no one gives me permission, I go through my life possessing both male and female energies. It can actually free me from all oppression that I suffered years ago, when I was feeling controlled by life." For Pham, overtly claiming to have such a forceful, masculinized side -- however much it might engender unease among many of East and Southeast Asian cultural backgrounds where deep divisions between what is considered fundamentally male and female remain common -- has become a vivid means to self empowerment. In this quest for self-definition and emotional freedom, Pham uses her art to play against socially imposed dichotomies based on normative notions of gender. Moreover, by generating unique imagery redefining her own sexuality and gender identity against the background of her Asian heritage, she seeks to more fully integrate what she considers to be artificially divided aspects of her psyche.

Throughout her years as an artist in America, Hanh Thi Pham has remained deeply engaged in a self-referential, transcultural process of "transmutation," an edgy, internal drama of self definition, overtly acted out in the public arena, in which she has continually sought to reconstruct the images she has of herself. Yet even as Pham's highly theatrical, performative artworks inhabit a profoundly self-centered zone of discomfort and private turmoil, because the arc of her life has been so deeply inflected by significant events in the twentieth century, her art can also manifest an indwelling power that allows it to transcend the limitations of the immediate and the purely personal.

With Lesbian Precepts, Pham also signalled that her attention had begun to more fully turn outward. She had come to the point in her life where she sought to claim a new role as a teacher, in order to better communicate her conceptions across generations. As she says, "In the Vietnamese thinking you have to teach things from within yourself and from within your family, within your origin, within your people before you can make something clear." Precisely because they are so firmly grounded in the direct experience of a closely examined life, Pham's "teachings," while hardly the norm in Asia or America, nevertheless have an authority based on a sharp, uncompromising voice that will remain resonant and provocative long after the viewer has left the exhibition.

-Margo Machida

This essay was prepared in conjunction with Hanh Thi Pham's one person exhibition A Vietnamese: Her Body in Revolt at the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan in 1997.