Women from Vietnam mark a new era

WORCESTER - Confucian morals instruct Vietnamese women to obey their fathers, husbands, and sons. Only recently have economic and social conditions begun to free women up to pursue their own dreams.

"Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists From Vietnam," the edifying and enlightening show at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross, taps 10 Vietnamese women who delve into a breadth of themes, some deeply rooted in their cultural heritage, and others bracingly contemporary.

Vietnamese women artists have not had it easy. The 20th century brought French colonizers and war to Vietnam. The Vietnamese government instituted economic reform in the late 1980s, and as women have become more independent, women artists have begun to come to the fore.

Curator Nora Taylor deftly manages the array in this traveling show organized by International Arts & Artists, a Washington, D.C.-based organization. In her meaty catalogue essay, she dovetails the history of women in Vietnam with a chronicle of painting there during the 20th century. Vietnam has a long history of printmaking, but unlike in China, very little painting went on until the French opened art schools in the early 20th century.

Despite being mobilized by war and industry in the latter half of the 20th century, Taylor writes, women artists put their work aside in favor of supporting their husbands and children until the late 1980s. Into the 1990s, artists were constrained by government edicts.

Even today, any art leaving the country must get government approval. In an interview, Taylor said she initially ran into official resistance about shipping some of the art in this exhibit to the United States. Ultimately, though, all the art was allowed to make the trip.

Taylor won't reveal which works sparked the trouble, but it's fun to speculate. Maybe it was Nguyen Thi Chau Giang's self-portraits, which echo the woundedness and psychological surrealism of Frida Kahlo's work. In "He Is Inside of Me," the artist wears bandages over one eye and both ears, and has a womb at either breast, complete with fetus, and a picture of a man, the artist's husband, emblazoned in between. Chau Giang's work is defiantly feminist.

Similarly, Ly Tran Quynh Giang depicts women in a way that suggests a harsh psychological reality. In "My Younger Sister," the tones are moody, the brush strokes bold and painterly. The woman looks severe, her features sharp, her mouth turned down over her long neck. The work conveys isolation, rage, and despair.

The gouache paintings of Dinh Y Nhi portray, in a childish hand, angst-ridden girls and women. They, too, have an edge, but they also burble along on the artist's sense of humor. "Daughters of Mr. Nguyen II" is both fraught and funny; the girls look up and lean backward, like a row of curious or frightened penguins.

Dang Thi Khue, on the other hand, celebrates women's traditions. The installation "Boundaries" features traditional Vietnamese textiles; they hang beneath arms that reference the limbs of a merciful bodhisattva, suggesting compassion is a womanly virtue. Vu Thu Hien paints on paper made from the bark of mulberry trees, working quickly to create simple figures that represent or interact with the spirit world. The sweet watercolor "Fish Flowers Spirits" features small fish swimming across the chest of a woman framed by two shadowy figures; all three have the same face.

Mulberry bark paper also serves as the ground for Dinh Thi Tham Poong's works, which address her heritage as an ethnic minority in Vietnam. Her brightly patterned paintings have a hint of mysticism, perhaps because the women in them are faceless; dresses and hats seem to pop off the page, which is itself covered with trees, leaves, or flowers.

Works such as these, packed with ethnographic detail, are harder for an American to read than more strictly contemporary works. Two photographers - both born in Vietnam but raised in the US - and one installation, video, and performance artist offer work depicting collisions of values.

The last, Ly Hoang Ly delves into bodily fluids - a 1990s theme to Western artists, but surprising coming from a Vietnamese. Her installation "Blossoming" is a grid of clear VHS boxes. She filled all but one with a confetti of white and pink material from unused sanitary napkins. In the other box, she stuffed a soiled baby diaper, messy and unappealing amid the rose-petal effects in the other boxes.

In each of Phuong M. Do's startling portraits of herself in Vietnam, the artist regards the camera directly while life goes on around her. She is both photographer and photographed, artist and model - a power dynamic that can be extrapolated to international relations, to colonizer and colonized. Simply by engaging the viewer's gaze with her own, she separates herself from those around her, but she is already separate from them - an American, different.

An-My Le is known for photographing reenactments of the Vietnam War and training maneuvers of soldiers on their way to Iraq. Here, she offers haunting landscapes of Vietnam, romantic in black and white, lush with detail. They play with an American's vision of Vietnam, ravaged by war (in one image, smoke billows in the distance), and they suggest that there's more here than meets the eye.

These last two Vietnamese-Americans can't help but consider America's view of Vietnam, colored by war. Most of the other artists in "Changing Identity" have moved beyond the war. They're more interested in examining their own lives, and what it means to be a woman in a society that is beginning to take interest in that.