University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Return engagement: contemporary art's traumas of modernity and history in diasporic Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh

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Return engagement: contemporary art's traumas of modernity and history in diasporic Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh

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Content RETURN ENGAGEMENT: CONTEMPORARY ART’S TRAUMAS OF MODERNITY AND HISTORY IN DIASPORIC SÀI GÒN AND PHNOM PENH by Việt Hồ Lê __________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) December 2011 Copyright 2011 Việt Ho Lê ii Table of Contents List of Figures iv Abstract v Introduction: Risky Returns 1 Dissertation Structure 32 Chapter One: The Art Part: Việt Kiều Artists, Divides, and Desires in Sài Gòn 43 The Art Part: Discursive Divides 46 Of Two Cities 51 It’s a Wonderful World (Sandrine Llouquet) 54 Map Quest (Tiffany Chung) 73 Gender/Wars 100 Conclusion 121 Chapter Bibliography 123 Chapter Two: What Remains: Returns, Representation and Traumatic Memory in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Refugee 128 Trauma Dramas 133 Time After Time: A Brief Historical Tracing 138 More Human Than Human: Rithy Pahn’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine 142 Return Policy (Conclusion) 160 Chapter Bibliography 192 Chapter Three: Fragments and (Post-)Colonial Memory: Leang Seckon and Hồng-An Trương’s Personal and Public Archives 195 Silence and Void, or Double Trouble: Hồng-An Trương’s Visual Archives 232 A Space of Time (or Love in the Time of Cholesterol) 251 Archive Fever Pitch 257 (The Night Sky) Conclusion 266 Chapter Bibliography 268 Chapter Four: Town and Country: Sopheap Pich and Phan Quang’s Urban-Rural Developments 270 Pich’s Forks in the Road 274 Love and Hate: Development in Việt Nam and Cambodia 299 iii Rice Country: Phan Quan’s Art of Place 308 Art, Dioxin, and Development: Đỉnh Q. Lê’s Damaged Gene Revisited 319 Conclusion: Modern Love (Part Deux, Pas de Deux) 333 Chapter Bibliography 338 Dissertation Conclusion: Leaving and Returns 341 Bibliography 352 Endnotes 356 iv List of Figures Figure 1: Binh Danh, Ghosts of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #2 23 Figure 2: Binh Danh, Memories of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #1 23 Figure 3: Binh Danh, Angkor Wat 23 Figure 4: Đỉnh Q. Lê, Untitled (from The Hill of Poisonous Trees) 25 Figure 5: Đỉnh Q. Lê, Untitled # 11 26 Figure 6: Đỉnh Q. Lê, Untitled # 9 26 Figure 7: Sandrine Llouquet, Milk installation view 57 Figure 8: Sandrine Llouquet, Milk detail 58 Figure 9: Sandrine Llouquet, Milk installation views 60 Figure 10: Tiffany Chung, 10.75ºN 106.6667ºE 1867/2007 78 Figure 11: Tiffany Chung, Be Cool Be Playful 82 Figure 12: 1978 Vietnamese propaganda poster 82 Figure 13: cosplay youth in Việt Nam 84 Figure 14: An-My Lê, Rescue 111 Figure 15: An-My Lê, Resupply Operations 112 Figure 16: Scenes from S-21; Vann Nath 159 Figure 17: Mik Siv confronts his father in Refugee 184 Figure 18: Leang Seckon, The Singing Soldier (Tiehien Jrieng Jomrieng) 200 Figure 19: Leang Seckon, Snowflower Skirt (Somphut Picar Brille) 201 Figure 20: Snowflower Skirt detail 202 Figure 21: Wheel of Life 204 v Figure 22: Wheel of Becoming 206 Figure 23: Leang Seckon, Bloody Shirt (Aow Bralac Chhiem) 207 Figure 24: Leang Seckon, Modern Skirt (Somphut Sivilay) 209 Figure 25: Leang Seckon, Peace Tree (Damcheu Sondepheap) 211 Figure 26: Leang Seckon, Golden Flower Skirt (Somphut Picar Mier) 216 Figure 27: Leang Seckon, Flicking Skirt (Somphut Bohbaouey) 218 Figure 28: Leang Seckon, Heavy Skirt (Somphut Mien Domngun) 220 Figure 29: Leang Seckon, Stuck-In-The-Mud Skirt (Somphut Gop Phuot) 223 Figure 30: Leang Seckon, Salty Flower Skirt (Somphut Picar Ompul) 225 Figure 31: Furniture to Aid in the Viewing of the Lover installation view 238 Figure 32: Hồng-An Trương, The Past is a Distant Colony still 241 Figure 33: Hồng-An Trương, It’s True Because it’s Absurd 246 Figure 34: Hồng-An Trương, Explosions in the Sky still 249 Figure 35: Sopheap Pich, Raft 284 Figure 36: Sopheap Pich, Junk Nutrients 287 Figure 37: The Pulse Within installation view at Tyler Rollins Fine Art 289 Figure 38: Sopheap Pich, Caged Heart 292 Figure 39: Sopheap Pich, 1979, site-specific installation 296 Figure 40: Sopheap Pich, Buddha (from the 1979 series) 297 Figure 41: Phan Quang, A Farmer’s Diary show, installation view 316 Figure 42: Đỉnh Q. Lê, Damaged Gene project, installation view 330 vi Abstract The dissertation examines modernity, popular culture and trauma in contemporary art in Asian America and Southeast Asia, with a focus on Việt Nam and Cambodia—two countries linked historically and regionally with each other and the United States. In addressing the dearth of art criticism on artists from the region, I argue that traumas such as military engagement and modernization return as thematic objects of desire and desired art objects on international art markets, however contested. I highlight artists tied to Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn, and challenge “diasporic” and “local” categorizations. Asian American artists living in Southeast Asia may be marketed—and identify—as “local.” Seasoned “local” Southeast Asian artists may have “diasporic” outlooks and practice flexible citizenship through their social networks, overseas residencies and exhibitions. In a competitive international art market, I assert that these artists strategically position themselves as both insiders and outsiders. For example, Sài Gòn returnees Tiffany Chung (Vietnamese American) and Sandrine Llouquet (Vietnamese French) embody and contest the gendered divides within “local/ non-local” communities. Meanwhile, Phnom Penh-based, U.S.-educated sculptor Sopheap Pich and Sài Gòn-based conceptual artist Phan Quang deal with urban-rural developments through different visual codes. For these artists, “translations” of local issues are (self-) exploitative gestures. Besides considering how artists deal with issues of marketing and location, I also question how artists of Southeast Asian descent are often expected to address the twin traumas of history and modernity. The breadth of visual culture in Asian America and Southeast Asia is explored through a range of visual art as well as documentary and vii experimental films. Return is a key theme across these media. For instance, the documentary films S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Refugee both feature protagonists returning to traumatic sites to confront figures from their pasts. The former film is directed by French Khmer Rithy Pahn whereas the latter is a collaborative project by Bay-area Japanese American filmmaker Spencer Nakasako and Cambodian American Mike Siv. Artistic framing, critical reception and varying audiences and contexts are analyzed in my project. Returning to historical archives, Cambodian collagist Leang Seckon and Vietnamese American experimental filmmaker Hồng-An Trương both use fragmentary approaches. They critique the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernizing projects. All of these cultural producers ambivalently grapple with violent pasts and the painful present. 1 Introduction: Risky Returns Trauma returns most unexpectedly. Whenever I swam in a pool during my twenties, I’d stop halfway through each lap, desperately cling on to the lane dividers, disoriented and gasping for breath, feeling as if I were about to drown. These panic attacks were triggered by long-buried bodily memories of my midnight raft escape from Saì Gòn with my mom at the age of three. Over several years I persevered in overcoming my terror. With the end of each lap, I returned to the beginning. I returned again and again. At the end of war, we began again as strangers from a different shore. 1 Again and again, we faced the traumas of history and modernity. In my thirties, swimming is now a meditative experience—I swim for about an hour three times a week. I now understand that the body has its own logic, its own memory. The afterlife of trauma leaves invisible traces. My dangerous ocean escape and the laps I swim draw invisible lines. These trails of water have shaped who I am. I cannot capture how it feels to drown—the panic and fear. I cannot outline the many passages, departure and return—via barge, plane, and so on—to where I am today. The passages are physical and psychological. All I can offer is a tracing, a translation of my experience. As Derrida notes, it is the failure of language and logos. I would like to muse about the gaps inherent such acts, as well as the possibilities of traces, translations and returns. To return implies leaving at an earlier moment, whether a few moments or a lifetime of exile. To return is to take a risk, to be vulnerable. Lot’s wife looks back and turns into a pillar of salt, stricken with grief. The cautionary tale warns us to not revisit the painful past. Otherwise we turn into to a monument of tears. If we glance back, we 2 are doomed to be eternal melancholics, fixated on the unhealing wound. To truly return, however, demands bifurcated vision. In returning one acknowledges the past and confronts the jarring present. This bifurcated vision opens up future directions. To return is to look back and to look ahead. A return trip is both departure and arrival. Each time I return to Phnom Penh, Sài Gòn or Little Saigon, Orange County after an absence of a few months or a few years, it looks familiar yet not the same. The mental image of a particular place and time juts up against its current reality. Friends have new hairstyles, new relationships. Some have new additions to their families, or different jobs. They may have moved somewhere else. Familiar landmarks are replaced by haughty edifices. Everything and everyone has subtly or dramatically shifted. It takes time to readjust. Returning to Việt Nam for the first time in thirty years, my mother says, “Everything looks different.” I italicize the word “look” because it is the visual realm which first impresses upon us the visceral signs of change. This project examines visual representation dealing with return. Upon return, we must reconcile the past and the present. We are confronted with the now. Upon return, the past, present and future meld. The multiple meanings of return are central to my study: 1. go back 2. reappear 3. pay again 4. yield profit 5. produce verdict. Through the multivalent frame of return, the dissertation examines modernity, popular culture and trauma in contemporary art in Asian America and Southeast Asia, with a focus on Việt Nam and Cambodia—two countries linked historically and regionally with each other and the United States. I examine artists who have gone back to their “homelands” and the reappearance of past events and figures in their work. I focus on artists and filmmakers with ties to Southeast 3 Asia including Sandrine Llouquet, Tiffany Chung, Rithy Panh, Spencer Nakasako and Mike Siv, Leang Seckon, Hồng-An Trương, Leang Seckon, and Sopheap Pich. In addressing the dearth of art criticism on artists from the region, I argue that traumas such as military engagement and modernization return as thematic objects of desire and desired art objects on international art markets, however contested. These art markets are sites of economic return for artists , gallerists, collectors, critics, and art institutions. I also critically look at the profits local and foreign investors expect from developments in Cambodia and Việt Nam, themes explored by painter Leang Seckon and installation artist Sopheap Pich. In analyzing Rithy Panh’s S-21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and the ethics of traumatic representation, I discuss the verdict returned in the first Khmer Rouge tribunal case. The term “return engagement” captures the commitments as well as the real and ideological battlefields these cosmopolitan artists maneuver. 1. Return: Go Back Historical Tracings Let me give a brief history in order to situate the project. The twentieth-century conflicts in Southeast Asia are often categorized by historians into three Indochinese wars. The first Indochina War (1946-154) was of the decolonization of French presence in in Cambodia, Laos and Việt Nam. Also called the Anti-French War in Việt Nam, this struggle for autonomy ended with theGeneva Conference. The Second Indochina War (1954-1975, also known as the Việt Nam or the American War, as it is referred to by the Vietnamese, was of Vietnamese unification and U.S. attempts to stop the “domino effect” of Communism. This war also involved Laos and Cambodia. The Third Indochina War 4 (1975-1991) was over who would govern Cambodia, and how—this strife provoked regional and international attention (Etcheson 2005). French and American military presence in Cambodia, Việt Nam and Laos— a region once called French Indochina—undergirds the area’s continued connections. For the sake of focus, my project does not include Laos, although I am cognizant of its communities’ struggles locally and abroad. The links between Cambodia and Việt Nam are striking since both countries have similar levels of socioeconomic development, both then and now, fostering cooperation and competition. Sharing a contested border, Việt Nam and Cambodia’s ancient and more recent history demonstrate their deep, vexed ties. Historical narratives vary and shift, dependent on official and personal perspectives. American, Vietnamese and Khmer vantage points vary greatly. Historian Carl Etcheson states, “what historians characterize as distinct wars with distinct protagonists appeared to many Cambodians to be simply one long war, with one central protagonist—the Khmer Rouge—driving the entire conflict” (4). Time’s passage also reveals unknown facts. During Nixon’s “secret war” in Cambodia and Laos from 1969 to 1973, earlier estimates note that 540,000 tons of bombs—three times the number of bombs dropped on Japan in WWII—were dropped in Cambodia (Hinton 8). 2 Recent figures incidate a staggering 2,756,941 tons of bombs were dropped in Cambodia (Owen and Kiernan). Nixon’s failed four year carpet-bombing campaign, intended to quickly end engagement in the area, only increased anti-U.S. sentiment. This heightened anti- imperialist outlook aided French-educated revolutionary Pol Pot’s rise to power. 5 On December 25,1979, Vietnamese troops launched an offensive in Cambodia, in response to Khmer Rouge border attacks. On January 7, 1979 Pol Pot was deposed. The Khmer Rouge retreated, ending the killings. Intensely debated, Khmer Rouge casualty estimates vary widely. These figures reflect ideological divides. Former Khmer Rouge cite less than 20,000 deaths whereas the Vietnamese government claim over 3 million victims (Heuveline). 3 Damien de Walque of the World Bank Research Group notes that these conflicting numbers are “not surprising” given the competing aims of the U.S.- sponsored Lon Nol government (1970-1975), the succeeding Khmer Rouge rule led by the radical Marxist Pol Pot, and the Khmer Rouge defectors that took over in 1979, backed by the Vietnamese. 4 The Yale Cambodian Genocide Program estimates 1.7 million people died from 1975-1979—twenty one percent of the population. 5 Throughout the 1980s the Khmer Rouge continued to struggle for power as U.S. economic sanctions contributed to the country’s poverty. Currently Cambodia is governed via King Norodom Sihamoni’s constitutional monarchy, led by Prime Minister Hun Sen (Chandler). Relations between Việt Nam and Cambodia continue as both countries rapidly develop. In 1986 Vietnam shifted from a collectivist economy to a capitalist economy under its đổi mới (“renovation”) policy, sparking economic growth, and a socialist- capitalist regime. The US normalized trade relations with Cambodia in 1992 and with Vietnam in 1995. Việt Nam is seen as both an ally and an economic contender. Việt Nam is the third largest foreign investor in Cambodia. Việt Nam is also one of Cambodia’s leading suppliers of electricity and food products, including vegetables. 6 6 When it comes to regional trade, Cambodia represents itself as an underdog. In an interview, Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh bemoans “The moment foreign investors come to the region, you try to attract them to come to Cambodia, they zip or zap to Việt Nam or to Thailand because of the large domestic market . . . for Least Developed Countries such as Cambodia, when you have large markets next door it is very difficult.” 7 Cambodia’s domestic market of approximately 14 million is small compared to Việt Nam’s 90 million and Thailand’s 70 million potential customers (2011 CIA World Fact Book). Every three years, the United Nations confers Least Developed Country status based on three criteria: low income, human capital, and economic vulnerability. 8 In Southeast Asia, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia are designated as Least Developed Countries. The Commerce Minister notes that Cambodia’s weakness can also be an advantage: “In ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations], Cambodia is the only one country that can maximise its status as a Least Developed Country . . . Cambodia can provide cheaper labor, compared to Việt Nam.” “Cheaper labor” industries include clothing and shoe manufacturers who take advantage of the workforce in Cambodia and Việt Nam. The ties that bind the two countries tighten. 2. Return: To Reappear Trauma & Modernities My my work draws out regional interactions—both present and past—between Cambodia and Việt Nam. Cambodia and Việt Nam’s economic growth brings a dramatically shifting socio-political, economic and cultural climate. In Vietnamese soap operas and Cambodian music videos, modern subjects enjoy middle-class luxuries. 7 Modernization, however, is also a traumatic process. Trauma theorist Anne E. Kaplan notes that “trauma is often seen as inherently linked to modernity” (24). Although regularly viewed as positive growth, industrialization and globalization are inherently brutal. Modernity’s assumed progress is lauded, obscuring its violence. In the shadow of gleaming highrises and glossy billboards lie deep inequities. Bright shopping malls erase the dark memory of displaced, impoverished populations once occupying the same territory. Memory and modernity is not linear. Memory does not unravel as a single chronological narrative; it starts and stops unevenly. Similarly, development is uneven, discrepant, as anthropologist Lisa Rofel points out. In this dissertation I will also go back and forth in time and space to underscore this idea. I assert that historical stressors and the ordeals of modernization are not disconnected but intrinsically linked. The project of modernity is also an historical one, not just a contemporary phenomenon. Different modernities are evident in the French colonial manses in Hà Nội, the Rusian brutalist 1970s architecture of Hồ Chí Minh’s mausoleum, and the angular modernist university buildings in Phnom Penh. History’s traumas still affect the present. In Cambodia and Việt Nam the current timeline of development is a direct result of the wars in the region. Mass destruction is antithetical to nation-building efforts. Only after the region stabilized was rapid growth possible. Modernity and trauma intimately inform each other. The concept of “trauma” is often discussed without grounded specificity. Suffering is viewed as a basic human affliction. Trauma, however, does not transcend 8 geopolitics. Trauma cannot be delinked from place and history, body and memory. Psychologist David Becker acknowledges the universalizing tendencies of the term “trauma” and trauma studies: “Trauma can only be understood with reference to the specific contexts in which it occurs.” Trauma is not an event unto itself but part of a social, cultural web: “ . . . in each different social context people should create their own definition within a framework, in which the basic focus is not so much on the symptoms of a person but on the sequential development of the traumatic situation” (7). Trauma theorists Jill Bennet and Rosanne Kennedy echo this critique, stating that psychoanalytic theory—and its largely US-centered research—while productive in analyzing Holocaust testimony and first world subjects and subjectivity may not be appropriate for other contexts across the globe (4). They call for a shift of the “monocultural discipline” into one “that can inform the study of memory within a global context.” They also suggest that postcolonial studies, while inherently engaged with trauma studies, should be more open to cultural studies frameworks which include artistic, aesthetic and cinematic representations (5). 9 I examine the valences of trauma and modernity through visual cultural production. How are the conflicts and post-war redevelopment in Southeast Asia remembered and represented by Southeast Asians, particularly Cambodians and Vietnamese? These changes are most apparent in the realm of the visual—changing cityscapes, marketing displays, government propaganda, and feature films. Mass media images inundate the viewer with visions of modern pleasures and past suffering. I examine the hyper-visibility of trauma tropes within Southeast Asia and the invisibility of 9 other representational, socio-political and historical narratives. In Western consciousness Cambodia is a country synonymous with genocide—psychic images of bloodshed and terror. We see thousands of black and white photographs of the dead, civilians staring ahead blankly past the shutter-click into their uncertain future which is now the undeniable past. There has been much scholarship on the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia’s troubled past—distant and recent—and present, and the connections in between. Similarly, Việt Nam has become a metonym for a lost war. We see spectacles of suffering—a naked girl screaming in terror center-framed, monks and gasoline, villages on fire, rooftop evacuations. My project highlights Cambodian and Vietnamese artistic responses beyond Western narratives of hysterical terror and historical tragedy. Although I focus on output by local and diasporic artists and filmmakers situated within Cambodia and Việt Nam, I am also attentive to work and networks outside of these nation-states, particularly the United States. I decenter dominant U.S.-centric discourse on the legacies of the war in Việt Nam by focusing instead on localized subjectivity and agency in both Việt Nam and Cambodia, apart from narratives which prioritize United States military involvement. Cambodia’s traumatic past is overdetermined. Social and political discourse—as well as artistic production and consumption—is not simply limited to specific national, ethnic and diasporic boundaries; they traverse many disparate borders. These “contact zones” create unforseen social, cultural, and economic interactions (Pratt). My work seeks to blur national and ethnic distinctions by drawing thematic comparisons between artists and artwork. 10 I highlight visual artists tied to Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn, and challenge “diasporic” and “local” categorizations. Asian American artists living in Southeast Asia may be marketed—and identify—as “local.” Seasoned “local” Southeast Asian artists may have “diasporic” outlooks and practice flexible citizenship through their social networks, overseas residencies and exhibitions. For example, Sài Gòn returnees Tiffany Chung (Vietnamese American) and Sandrine Llouquet (Vietnamese French) embody and contest the gendered divides within “local/ non-local” communities. Meanwhile, Phnom Penh-based, U.S.-educated sculptor Sopheap Pich and Sài Gòn-based conceptual artist Phan Quang deal with urban-rural developments through different visual codes. For these artists, “translations” of local issues are (self-) exploitative gestures. In a competitive international art market, I assert that these artists strategically position themselves as both insiders and outsiders. Besides considering how artists deal with issues of marketing and location, I also question how artists of Southeast Asian descent are often expected to address the twin traumas of history and modernity. The breadth of visual culture in Asian America and Southeast Asia is explored through a range of visual art as well as documentary and experimental films. Return is a key theme across these media. For instance, the documentary films S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Refugee (2003) both feature protagonists returning to traumatic sites to confront figures from their pasts. The former film is directed by French Khmer Rithy Panh whereas the latter is a collaborative project by Bay-area Japanese American filmmaker Spencer Nakasako and Cambodian American Mike Siv. Artistic framing, critical reception and varying 11 audiences and contexts are analyzed in my project. Returning to historical archives, Cambodian collagist Leang Seckon and Vietnamese American experimental filmmaker Hồng-An Trương both use fragmentary approaches. They critique the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernizing projects. All of these cultural producers ambivalently grapple with violent pasts and the painful present. Disciplines and Interventions: Area Studies Engaging discourses within Southeast Studies, Visual Studies, and Trauma Studies my interdisciplinary project examines the ways in which political and national discourses are manifest through visual culture (film, mass media, art) and its implications regarding trauma and cultural memory . I use an ethnographic participant observer approach as well as a Cultural Studies framework which examines public and political discourse through critical visual and textual analysis of cultural production. In the remainder of this introduction I will discuss my disciplinary interventions which encompass Asian American and Southeast Asian Studies, visual anthropology and art history. Apsaras & Diasporas It is important that Asian American Studies reconsider its definitions of diaspora and make its focus truly transnational. In 2003, the editors of Theorizing Diaspora Janna Braziel and Annita Mannur note that the term “diaspora” is contested—“Most recent theorizations of diaspora . . . have been marked by ambiguity of the term itself” (3-4). 10 What constitutes a diaspora? Braziel and Mannur state that the term diaspora has been 12 increasingly used by cultural critics, anthropologists, and literary scholars to describe the twentieth century’s mass migrations and displacements, including “independence movements in formerly colonized areas, waves of refugees fleeing war-torn states, and fluxes of immigration in the post-World War II era” (4). This older view of diaspora emphasizes the bounds of the nation state. As a consequence of political or economic upheaval refugees, migrants, and exiles flee one state for another. “There is no diaspora without borders and no borders without states,” observes David Palumbo Liu (344). In crossing borders, diasporic subjects reinscribe the boundaries between home and exile. Diasporic movement has been conceived as a population’s dispersal from one location to a host of other places. The singular point of origin—former colony, war-torn nation, repressive regime, impoverished nation—ends in multiple possible destination points. Diaspora also “etymologically suggests the . . . fertility of dispersion, diseemination, and the scattering of seeds (Braziel and Mannur 4).The seed-spore analogy has been widely used in Asian American Studies to talk about the many Asian diasporas across the globe. These communities have settled and taken root in their new chosen homes. In this view, the homeland is a fixed entity, the essentialized site of origins. Subsequently, scholars have veered away from simple constructions of nativist belonging to account for diasporic subjects’ multiply-situated identifications. Migrants, immigrants, and refugees often do not settle in one location—they take part of multiple movements, both physical and psychological. Lisa Lowe, Paul Gilroy, Rey Chow, among others, acknowledge that diasporic identities are not binaries of home/ exile but are shaped by repeated geographic crossings. The seed-spore model has been 13 replaced by frameworks which attempt to capture the “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity” of diverse diasporic experiences (Lowe 60-97). To return to one’s homeland does not mean returning home. Karin Aguilar San-Juan suggests that for many Asian American subjects, looking back does not mean returning to the mythic site of ethnic origins. Reversing the logic of returning to an Eastern homeland, she writes, “to go westward, is to go home, in the sense that many Asian Americans have family in California, Washington state or farther in Hawai’i.” (25). For Aguilar San-Juan, Asian Americans find home in America, not necessarily Asia. 11 Palumbo Liu’s binary between the “memory of the homeland and the consciousness of the diasporic new land” (345) is no longer a relevant distinction. The old country is now a brave new world—Cambodia and Việt Nam’s breakneck growth ensures that the landscape of memory is altered. For some, the diasporic new land has been home for generations. Heterogeneous diasporic frameworks must account for the different experiences of immigrants who have settled in the United States near the turn of the twentieth century as well as more recent economic migrants and flexible citizens. In this digital age, borders are increasingly permeable. At the same time borders are ever-vigilantly policed, fueled by anxiety over terrorism, global economic downturns, and the decline of U.S. empire. The new diasporic subject questions these demarcations and fears. Anthropologist Ashley Curruthers observes that for Vietnamese diasporic subjects, the distinction between homeland and diaspora is collapsed. Home is both Việt Nam and abroad, and in-between. Overseas Vietnamese negotiate different ideological systems at once: capitalism, market socialism, democracy. The breakdown of borders is 14 facilitated by the exchange of cultural goods such as music videos and films and repeated returns, both real and imagined. The lines between diasporic and transnational identities are blurred. Let’s parse the difference between diaspora and transnationalism. Palumbo Liu marks a distinction between a “cross-cultural” version of diaspora with “ethnicized” subjects, and a transnational one of “transmigrant, multiply situated identities” (345). The former cross cultural diasporic subject has been incorporated by the state’s multicultural logic whereas the latter transnational subject refuses assimilation. This seems like the difference between racialized, settled Asian Americans versus more recent migrants that are in limbo, shuttling between identities. But this dichotomy may be a false one. One can be both a cross cultural subject and a transnational one.There is an overlap between the terms diaspora and transnationalism, since both address movements across borders. Explicating the difference between the two terms, Braziel and Mannur note, “diaspora refers specifically to the movement—forced or voluntary—of people from one or more nation states to another. Transnationalism speaks to larger, more impersonal forces— specifically, those of globalism and global capitalism” (8). They define diaspora as movements of subjects and transnationalism as movements of objects. The forces of global capital, however, cannot be decoupled from humans. I reframe transnationalism as a subject position, not an abstract force. Diasporic movement from one state is to another is limited to one-way crossings. Transnationalism accounts for myriad crossings. Arjun Appadurai notes in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization that through individual and collective imaginaries, communities are created 15 across physical and psychic boundaries. The imagination is viewed as a “social practice”—not a fixed process—which allows for multifaceted negotiations of space, temporality, and agency (31).The author’s celebratory call for examining media, mass migration, and the imagination is a provocative stance. He does not, however, fully address in detail the complexities of such intersections, nor does he address the inequities of such interactions. Building upon Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” my work highlights the differential hierarchies of legibility, privilege, marketing and meaning in transnational cultural consumption and cultural work within a more localized, less universally cosmopolitan sphere. Framing diaspora as celebratory examples of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity can be dangerous. It elides the specificity of diasporic experience. Placing concepts of diaspora within transnational movements and moments grounds them. Much of Asian American Studies inquiry has been focused on what happens in America and not Asia, since that was seen as the perview of Asian Studies and area studies. 12 We must not overlook the links between Asia and America for diasporic subjects. Diasporic outlooks have long placed emphasis on zones of settlement, looking west, looking home, as Aguilar San-Juan muses. A transnational perspective focuses on movement rather than settlement. As transnational subjects, we are never truly settled. A transnational outlook is a return gaze, away from the West towards the East. But this is different from old homeland/ new exilic land binaries and seed-spore metaphors. The return gaze is both forwards and backwards, Janus-faced. 16 For Southeast Asian subjects, the link is between Asia and its diasporas also important. Citing the “billions in overseas remittances, de facto nations in exile, and transnational traffic in ideas and people,” cultural critic Việt Nguyễn argues for a Southeast Asian studies attuned to larger diasporic movements—an area studies not focused only local or regional interactions. 13 We must once again reconsider and redefine diaspora to account for new global realities. Transnationalisms | Asian American Studies | Ethnography Transnational approaches in Asian American Studies broaden the field and the scope of inquiry. Asian American Studies is an interdisciplinary field, and transnational perspectives open up disciplinary engagements. In challenging the boundaries between Asian American Studies, Asian Studies and American Studies, I advocate for a multivalent understanding of the workings of memory and popular culture which questions geographic and political borders, particularly that of the nation-state. Most area studies scholarship focuses on a single nation-state, inattentive to regional and international interactions. My work teases out the connections between Cambodia and Việt Nam, including their traumatic pasts and burgeoning present and future. Issues pertaining to gender and sexuality are often left out of regional analyses. My project is attentive to the ways gender is bound by state strictures and power relations. Groundbreaking works on cross-national subjects are attuned to gender and labor divides. Anthropologists such as Aihwa Ong and Martin Manalansan IV, among others, have paved the way for scholarship on transnational identities. Ong has written about Cambodian immigrant communities and their adjustments to life in the US and issues 17 concerning labor and citizenship. Manalansan has worked with gay Filipino immigrant communities in New York and has noted that their queer affiliations are multiply rooted. Through intensive on the ground fieldwork, both scholars observe that immigrants sustain transnational ties that are crucial in how they view themselves and engage their communities. Although indebted to this work, my project addresses the gaps in scholarship on trauma and cultural representation—particularly visual representation— within a transnational frame. Scholarship on transnational visual artists and trauma is scarce because of the numerous disciplines and fields one must master: anthropology, art history/ visual studies, trauma studies, in addition to linguistic and cultural competency.Visual anthropologist Christina Schwenkel and visual studies scholar Annie Coombes look at the international dimensions of traumatic memory through monuments and state exhibits in Việt Nam and South Africa. However, not enough attention is paid to contemporary cultural producers who wrestle with trauma’s afterlife. 14 Through a transnational lens, I intervene by discussing living artists dealing with historical and contemporary traumas. I gain insight on these contemporary artists through in-depth fieldwork. I believe that extended international fieldwork opens up future directions of Asian American Studies. As a transnational artist, organizer, and researcher I have a unique perspective and set of skills which have allowed me to establish working relationships with most of the major artists, museums, galleries and alternative art spaces in Việt Nam and Cambodia. I have lived in Southeast Asia doing qualitative ethnographic research for 18 three years: first in Việt Nam as a Fulbright Fellow and then Cambodia as a Center for Khmer Studies Senior Research Fellow. I look at institutional and cultural practices from the ground up rather than top down. Doing work on the ground and in the field as both insider and outsider is a position I share with many of the “diasporic” artists in the book. These artists have had access to education and opportunities “local” ones may not. It is a position I interrogate. I am filling the void on scholarship on art and politics in the region and its diasporas. Within anthropology, as in other disciplines, self-reflexivivity is crucial. My position as a researcher undoubtedly affects my relationships with my subjects. I am indebted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ use of “thick description.” 15 This interpretive approach delves into layers of mediated social meaning. Culture is a semiotic system, open to fissures and gaps. Geertz observes that “culture is not a power, something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can causally be attributed; it is a context, something within which [interconnected sytems of meaning] can be intelligibly—that is, thickly—described. Culture is context. Following this model, I describe scenes in detail to give the reader a sense of the relationships between artist, art communities, and researcher. Although these personal anecdotes may appear casual, they convey the complicated networks I and the artists I write about must maneuver. Unlike older anthropological models of immersive research for a year or two “in the field” and a return “home” to write up the findings, my engagement is both intensive and sporadic. The traditional ethnographic divides between home and research abroad has been questioned for its hierarchical distinctions. Objects of inquiry (the field) and 19 normative sites of knowledge (home institutions) are separated (Schwenkel 13; Gupta and Ferguson 1997, 12-15). For almost a decade, I have built my professional and personal archives. Like anthropologists Anna Tsing and Christina Schwenkel, my “patchwork” ethography embraces “long term and cyclical returns ‘to the field’” (Schwenkel 14). My three plus years in “the field” is supplemented by my annual returns to Southeast Asia, which I also consider home. Researchers like Schwenkel and I challenge where fieldwork is and home where home is. Contrary to older models of diaspora, our movements reveal other subject positions. Like other transnational subjects, the line between home and abroad is not clear. Contested Visions: Temples and Trauma (Art History) Geographic blinders do not only occur in area studies but art history as well. My argument for transgressing national boundaries also applies to art history, which should continue to shift its Western-centric knowledge base to encompass visual cultures in myriad centers and peripheries. Art historian Alice Yang has noted that contemporary Asian art histories are marginalized. I would further emphasize Southeast Asian and Asian American art histories are marginalized. There are less than a handful of art historians working on contemporary visual artists of Cambodian and Vietnamese descent, namely Nora Taylor, Boreth Ly, Moira Roth and myself. In combining the approaches of visual anthropology with art history, I aim to shift the largely Western focus of art history. In using art history’s attention to close visual analysis of artwork, I further complement the insights I get from intensive field work. 20 To grasp the complexity of an artwork, I rely on close readings of the work combined with studio visits and interviews whenever possible. I also consider critic’s and viewers’ reactions to the artpiece or film. My background in art history compels me to rigorously consider the link between form and content, materials and meaning. I also connect artists with the larger political and historical worlds they engage. My ethnographic training gives me another set of tools to engage creative producers. Through extended participant observation and oral interviews, I gain insight about each artist’s unique process and the organizations they work with. Asian American art historian Margo Machida calls this process an “oral hermeneutics.” Machida states this is an “exploratory form of dialogic engagement which seeks to share interpretive authority with artists by linking the use of oral history methods with a hermeneutical orientation toward textual interpretation” (8). 16 This is simply ethnographic methodology applied to art historical analysis. Although I do not refer to my approach as “oral hermeneutics,” I also combine insights culled from conversations with artists with close readings or artwork. Artists shift identities in local and international contexts. I use a range of methodologies to understand how artists and cultural organizers self-identify and are identified by critics, gallerists, and arts organizations in Cambodia, Viêt Nam, and abroad. A work of art does not exist in a vacuum, nor do artists. It is my goal to both rethink and bridge the gap between transnational identities in Cambodia and Viêt Nam. Currently there is no conceptual art education or sustained contemporary cultural criticism in Việt Nam or Cambodia, yet there are vibrant cultural communities in these 21 locales. Apart from text-based modes of interpretation and analysis, the intersections of ethnography and visual culture offer fresh insights on issues of voice and visuality. Through a combination of disciplinary approaches, the artist’s perspective and working context becomes clearer. Following T.J. Clark and Thomas Crow’s models of a “social history of art,” I examine the social, historical and political conditions in which artists’ work is produced. I focus on visual culture because it highlights social and individual visions of what is modern, traumatic, or desirable. Similarly, what is repressed and not seen on an everyday level may be represented. These representations make evident individual and institutional struggles. I am interested in discussions of the (Eurocentric) gaze and legibility and lack (Cheng, Eng). It is within the realm of images and text that government propaganda and mass media operate. Scholars working on “cultural memory” and visual representation such as Sturken and Akira Lippit have discussed the ways certain traumatic narratives are invisible or hyper-visible. Filmic images may function as “screen images” displacing social anxieties and fears (Sturken). In the aftermath of trauma, the visible and the invisible are complementary representational tropes (Lippit). 4. Return: Yield Profit My disciplinary intervention in art history and visual culture focuses on the international art market and its fetishization of trauma and transnational difference. For example, Southeast Asian artists are often rendered invisible unless they make work that 22 plays into hyper-visible discourses of trauma. For instance, Binh Danh—an Asian American artist born in 1977 to a Cambodian father and Vietnamese mother—has built a profitable career grappling with the aftermath of trauma. His most well-known and well- collected works are “chlorophyll prints” addressing the Việt Nam War. These prints are portraits of soldiers and civilians imprinted on leaves through a photosynthetic photographic process he developed. In 2011 the artist had a solo exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art (of chlorophyll prints and daguerreotypes) entitled In the Eclipse of Angkor. This body of work is the culmination of a trip “in 2008 to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Choeung Ek, the site of the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge; and Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s famous Khmer temple.” 17 Daguerreotype images of an អប្ ស រា (apsara or celestial female dancer/ nymph) carving at Angkor Wat and a rephotograph of a young female victim of Tuol Sleng are respectively entitled Divinities of Angkor#1 (2008) and Ghost of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #2 (2008). Phnom Penh-based curator Erin Gleeson bemoans the fact that the interest in art about Cambodia is often limited to depictions of “temples and trauma.” 18 It is tourism through art. Why is work about Cambodia constrained by such stereotypes? I agree with Gleeson’s assessment about the binary interests of curators and collectors. Temples and traumas are the most visible representations Westerners have of Cambodia. Ancient ruins become aesthetic shorthand for the country. Psychic ruins become anesthetic. Is Danh critiqueing such stereotypes? 23 Figure 1: left: Binh Danh, Ghost of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #2, 2008. Daguerreotype, 11 3/8 x 9 1/2 inches. In the Shadow of Angkor series. All images courtesy of the artist. Figure 2: right: Binh Danh, Memories of Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum #1, 2008. Chlorophyll print on nasturtium and resin, 12 x 10 inches. In the Shadow of Angkor series. Figure 3: Binh Danh, Angkor Wat, 2008. Daguerreotype, 13 1/4 x 16 inches. In the Shadow of Angkor series. 24 Danh’s predecessor is Sài Gòn-based Vietnamese American artist Đỉnh Q. Lê. Lê has built an even more impressive career out of the legacies of U.S. military involvement in Cambodia, Việt Nam and Laos. The senior artist was born 1968 in Hà Tiên, a Vietnamese town near the Cambodia border. In 2011, Lê’s video installation The Farmers and the Helicopter (2006) was featured in a solo exhibition at one of contemporary art’s most prestigious institutions, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 19 Lê has two series of work dealing with Cambodia—trauma and tourism—is arguably less didactic than Danh’s approach. The 1998 series Splendor and Darkness literally weaves together photographic images of Tuol Sleng victims with close ups for Anglor Wat (both mainly black and white), forming an abstracted tapestry of sorts, a dialectic of transcendence and terror. Lê’s May 2008 solo show The Hill of Poisonous Trees (translation of the Khmer word Tuol Sleng) at P.P.O.W. gallery in New York City revisits the infamous photographic archive of victims at Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This series of “photo-weavings” superimpose the black and white images of victims with yellow-hued shots of the museum—its long halls, small warren of prisons, torture chambers. Both artists use formal innovations—Danh’s “chlorophyll prints” and Lê’s “photo-weavings”—to re-present temples and trauma. The formal innovations serve as an aesthetic filter and translation of otherwise gruesome and overused imagery. The formal quality of the work both allows the viewer to engage in the subject matter but also contains it at a safe remove. All of those who have engaged in dark tourism (real or virtual) in Southeast Asia are familiar with the black and white photographic grids of Cambodian Khmer Rouge victims. Postcards and paintings of Angkor Wat traffics in 25 clichés of bas-relief close-ups, sunrises and sunsets. How to present trauma and temples in a fresh way? Danh and Lê’s artistic responses refreshes the tourists’ or gallery-goers’ jaded outlook, provides a new angle. I do not go into Danh and Lê’s works in depth in this introduction and in my dissertation because much has already been written on their work. I write about their work related to Cambodia here because I want to underscore the fact that visibility for artists from the “periphery” is still contingent upon playing to the “center.” Topics that they deal with are often circumscribed—temples and trauma. Figure 4: Đỉnh Lê, Untitled (from The Hill of Poisonous Trees), 2008 26 Figure 5: Đỉnh Q. Lê. Untitled # 11, from Cambodia: Spendour and Darkness series, 1999. 40 ¼ x 58 ¼ inches. Chromogenic color prints and linen tape. Courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA. Figure 6: Đỉnh Q. Lê. Untitled #9 from Cambodia: Splendor and Darkness series (detail), 1998. C-Print. Courtesy of P.P.O.W, New York. To better understand Danh and Lê’s memorializing output—and by extension, other diasporic artists that are part of the first and second generation of Vietnamese immigrants—I will briefly discuss differing approaches in trauma. Trauma theorist Ruth Leys examines the underlying assumptions of theoretical and clinical approaches on psychic trauma. Leys notes there are two basic currents in trauma theory, which have oscillated through time: 1) mimetic theory, and 2) antimimetic theory. Mimetic theory holds that “precisely because of the victim cannot recall the original traumatogenic event, she is fated to act it out or in other ways imitate it” (298). The traumatized subject cannot fully comprehend the original trauma or completely represent it, nor are they able to 27 integrate it into their world view. Antimimetic theories hold that the trauma is entirely external to the victim, and it is possible to recall and represent the trauma. The two historically contingent currents appear to overlap with pyschoanalytic and enlightenment approaches, mimetic theory aligned with the former and antimimetic with the latter. Mimetic theory is aligned with psychoanalytic approaches in that both are internally oriented; trauma is ingested, repressed. Within this framework, artists are melancholics who constantly revisit traumatic sites, incapable of resolution. Antimimetic theory may be aligned with enlightenment approaches in that both are externally oriented. Trauma is an outside event that can be mastered, worked through more or less rationally. Within this view, artists gain mastery over trauma through mastery of its representations. However, Leys’ Foucauldian genealogy points out that the mimetic and antimimetic paradigms do not resolve themselves, rather there is a continuing and productive tension (often appearing within the body of work of a single theorist). This ambivalent tension is at the heart of Lê’s practice. Lê refuses to offer a “complete” narrative of trauma; instead she offers the viewer disjointed fragments, quotations from mass media and mental images. Ann Kaplan notes that humanities research often doesn’t account for “vicarious trauma”—trauma which is not directly experienced but may manifest in various traumatic symptoms (e.g. generational trauma or “empathetic” symptoms haunting clinicians or researchers). Using the (Freudian) notion of transference, Dominick LaCapra describes similar symptoms as vicarious trauma: “Transference takes place in relations between 28 people and . . . in one’s relationship to the object of study itself” (142). Danh wrestles with this “vicarious trauma.” As part of the “1.5” generation, Danh experienced the effects of war and displacement firsthand but largely through second-hand accounts and media representation. Danh work does not offer a singular account of his personal traumatic experience but points to how generational trauma is transmitted: through snippets of images in movies and newspaper archives, through stories relatives tell, through the visage of passing strangers that bear the traces of painful pasts. Danh, Lê, and their artistic peers do not present authentic tales of woe, but point at how constructed narratives of the past, present and future collide. It is a form of adaptation, reinvention. The Great Debate Lê and Danh are among the most visible artists of Vietnamese descent on the international art scene. They are famous, but will they ever be included in the household- name, postal stamp canon of Picasso and Warhol? Or are they forever limited by their ethnicity? In Nora Taylor’s provocative essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Vietnamese Artists?” she notes that “artists from peripheral loci of art production—that is, outside the Western art market centers in places such as Việt Nam—often “exist” or are known only because Western galleries, art auction houses, or even art historians have situated them . . .” (Taylor 2004). These institutional forces often reflect Eurocentric hierarchies. “Greatness” implies transcending the bonds of race and gender; to be “great” one has to create “timeless” works that speak to humanity. The title of Taylor’s essay draws from art historian Linda Nochlin’s seminal feminist essay “Why Have There Been 29 No Great Women Artists?” which highlights the gendered structural inequities within the art world. Gender, class and race discrimination persists today both more distinctly and more imperceptibly. Multiculturalism’s shadow obscures the lack of opportunities for marginalized artists through celebratory, tokenizing discourse. Global gendered economies of scale reveal a shifting world order which demands difference. Yet this quest for difference is homogenizing.Taylor observes that the identity of artists from the “periphery” are often lumped into a single ethnic or national frame (160). Both Taylor and Nochlin critique the standards of greatness. Artists from peripheral sites are automatically geographically and ethnically constrained. They cannot reach the upper pantheon of artists. Rhetorically, the parameters of greatness is indifferent to creed, color, and gender. In reality, however, artistic masters and their masterpieces reinscribe vast hierarchies. The question of discovering a great Cambodian, Vietnamese–or any–artist is a futile exercise. There is no point in raising the issue. “Why have there been no great Southeast Asian artists?” is a query which reveals the power structures and cultural biases by which “greatness” is evaluated and conferred. We must scrutinize the position of those asking and answering the inquiry, even if it is us. Yes there have been great Khmer and Vietnamese artists but they are heralded as masters within a national context and unknown elsewhere because of lack of critical and commercial resources. Greatness is subjective. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has written about the “economy of cultural goods”: the overlapping networks of art institutions, critics, artists and academics. 20 This project makes the hierarchies of art histories and art markets —as well as the negotiations 30 by artists, scholars, and organizers—explicit. I highlight the frameworks of desirability within the art market, scholarship, and institutions, as well as efforts by artists and organizers to make themselves more desirable (and legible) to these external forces. The desire of many contemporary experimental Vietnamese and Cambodian local and diasporic artists to gain recognition on the international art market and attain both symbolic and real capital is an area I investigate. Increasing numbers of dealers/ collectors/ curators/ critics are coming to Southeast Asia. The region’s emerging art scenes are trumpted as the next hot thing. Artists have varied artistic responses to what is expected of them. “Good” art is still measured by Western artistic canons. It is form of cultural imperialism. Parallels can be drawn to the French colonial discourses about aesthetics, modernity, and authenticity. The complexities of positioning within a global economic order demands that artistic agency is seen from a variety of socio-cultural perspectives. Museums, gallerists, and curators increasingly build shows and collections around the category of Southeast Asian, thematically highlighting flows between countries rather than focusing on a lone nation. Art scholarship should also address this trend. Curatorial and critical work on the artistic output of sole city or country is still important for a deep understanding of cultural influences and developments. For example, Taylor’s Painters in Hanoi hones in on different generations of Vietnamese painters within a specific geographic region, as the title attests to. My research project expands these parameters to include Vietnamese and Cambodian local and diasporic artists living in these countries who work in a range of media—video, works on paper, installation, photography. The 31 disssertation highlights the interwoven historical, social, and political variables that affect the artist’s relationship with her audiences. These factors in turn shape legibility/ intelligibility (which “local/ universal” themes easily translate for an international art audience), visibility (scholarship, discourse, access to art venues, promotion, publications) and marketability (art market). The following section details individual chapters. 32 Dissertation Structure Chapter One: The Art Part: Vi ệt Ki ều Artists, Divides, and Desires in Sài Gòn My first chapter focuses on Sài Gòn returnees Sandrine Llouquet and Tiffany Chung and the gendered divides within “local/ non-local” communities. Questioning the ways their work is positioned for profitable returns on a global market, I maintain that these artist-organizers strategically position themselves as both insiders and outsiders. Although both artists call Việt Nam home, I argue that it is their ambivalent subject positions, representative of Việt Kiều artists residing in Việt Nam, that both gives them greater visibility on the international art market and constrain their personal and artistic identities. First, I critically question my role as a “non-local” with certain theoretical and aesthetic biases. Secondly I explore Sandrine Llouquet’s simultaneously saccharine and sinister drawings and installation of human mutants (or simply mutilated humans). Her work allows me to discuss the mutating discourse on citizenship and belonging in Việt Nam through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becomings.” The third segment outlines Tiffany Chung’s two series which wrestle with changing topographies and identities. Maps is a series of large-scale abstract drawings with deals with visions of modernity through the overlaying of development maps—some centuries-old, others blueprints of future utopias. Chung’s photographic series Play mixes Vietnamese communist propaganda posters with cosplay—a Japanese subculture craze of 33 dressing up as anime characters adopted by Vietnamese youth. This body of work comments on the creation and manipulation of national subjects. I then look at gender trouble in global and aesthetic economies and how they ground my examination of the hyped “rise” of Southeast Asian contemporary art. I connect this to late capital’s ever-evolving demands for new products and cheap (raced, gendered) labor and products. The strategies of internationally visible Việt Kiều artists such as Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba, Đỉnh Q. Lê, Liza Nguyễn and An-My Lê is briefly compared. Throughout, I highlight heterogeneous temporalities and tensions: in the artists’ work, the varied art scenes they orbit and Sài Gòn as a morphing metropolis. Chapter Two: What Remains: Returns, Representation, and Traumatic Memory in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Refugee This chapter examines two documentaries, Rithy Panh’s S-21:The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Spencer Nakasako’s Refugee (2003). These two films feature Cambodian and Cambodian American subjects whose subjectivity is centered squarely within the frame, at once displacing and reifying standard Western mainstream representations. I do not mean to valorize these works for rendering visible the invisible—or critique it for reemphasizing a certain kind of traumatic visibility—but rather point out that these narratives (also rife with contradictions), among other narratives, offer alternate viewpoints, part of a multiplicity of vantage points. I first discuss frameworks on trauma and mass media. Secondly I provide a brief historical background in which to situate the films. Through themes of return, confrontation and repetition I analyze S-21:The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Refugee. Considering Khmer Rouge tribunal verdicts and challenging David Eng and David 34 Kajanjian’s notions of loss as a productive space, I suggest these filmic subjects are melancholics unable to “successfully” mourn whereas the spectators of these “trauma dramas’” are exempt. Cambodian diasporic filmmaker Rithy Panh’s documentary S-21 returns to the site of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison (called S-21) with two remaining survivors out of the 17,000 that were extinguished in this former schoolhouse. This film functions as a testimony, a form of witnessing (Laub). Through the physical S-21 museum site and the documentary, I look at Vietnamese and Cambodian national rhetoric regarding memorialization. Mai Lam, the Vietnamese man who created the Museum of Genocidal Crimes in Phnom Penh also initiated the Museum of American War Crimes in Sài Gòn (Chandler). Refugee documents Mike Siv’s first return to Cambodia with his two best friends and his difficult reunion with his father and brother after twenty two years. A refugee living in the impoverished San Francisco Tenderloin district, Siv experiences “hidden grief” (to use Anne Cheng’s term). His socio-economic exclusion becomes a form of loss, mirrored by the loss of his family members. In both films, scenes of return and confrontation mark agency and refusal. These silences open up spaces of contemplation and comprehension as well as confusion. The films function as testimonies—explicative pedagogical narratives. By returning to what remains time and again, the filmmaker, his subjects and audience are confronted by deep silences and ambivalence. I explore the silences and repeated gestures that are central in understanding these films. 35 Chapter Three: Fragments and (Post-)Colonial Memory: Leang Seckon and Hồng-An Trương’s Personal and Public Archives This chapter explores Cambodian collagist and painter Leang Seckon and Vietnamese American experimental filmmaker Hồng-An Trương’s return to personal and historical archives. Throughout the chapter, I maintain that the reappearance of history’s fragments—colonial and modern—as well as the formal use of fragmentation in their works question current notions of space and time. Within the larger frame of diasporic cultural production, I discuss Hồng-An Trương’s solo exhibition entitled The Past is a Distant Colony, which includes a video “sculpture,” Furniture to Aid in the Viewing of the Lover (2009) (1:44), and her video trilogy Adaptation Fever (2006-07)—comprised of The Past is a Distant Colony (9:00), It's True Because it's Absurd (3:00), and Explosions in the Sky (Điên Biên Phu 1954) (3:00). Hồng-An Trương’s and Leang Seckon’s palimpsest work is The tensions between remembering and forgetting is mined in Trương and Seckon’s work. Leang Seckon’s “autobiographical” Heavy Skirt series become a portable archive of sorts. Through a careful formal reading of Seckon’s large-scale paintings and smaller collages, I unpack the artist’s choices in representing the minefields of the past, present and future. By asserting he is only representing his “personal” narrative, Seckon sidesteps the minefield of overt political critique. I argue that the reappearance of history’s fragments in Seckon’s and Trương’s works critique the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernizing projects. I discuss these creators’ artistic techniques dealing with these shifts in tandem with Bliss Cua 36 Lim’s and Henri Bergson’s critical observations about standardized time. According to Lim and Bergson, modernity homogenizes and compresses time and space. The international time line and world clock reinforce geography and temporality, eradicating other alternatives. These artists and theorists point to the enduring violence of such strict measures. Through Seckon’s and Trương’s different approaches to postcolonial collections, I revisit Derrida’s insights on the archive. Trương’s fragments speak about the gaps in official history whereas Seckon’s cobbled images point at memory’s splinters. I assert that these artists do not suffer from Freudian melancholia but rather have a case of Derridean archive fever. Chapter Four: Town and Country: Sopheap Pich and Phan Quang’s Urban-Rural Developments This final chapter deals with urban-rural development for economic return in Cambodia and Việt Nam through the work of Phnom Penh-based sculptor Sopheap Pich and Sài Gòn-based conceptual artist Phan Quang. Pich is hailed by New York gallerist Tyler Rollins as “Cambodia’s most prominent artist.” I first discuss Pich’s takes on the twin traumas of history and development (particularly Boeung Kak Lake) for two recent international shows. Pich’s first solo exhibition in New York at Tyler Rollins Fine Art in 2010, entitled The Pulse Within, specifically deals with the controversial development of Boeung Kak Lake and the price of Cambodia’s growth in general. As the title of the exhibition implies, things are very different beneath the surface. Pich delves even further into personal narrative for the 6 th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2009, an 37 internationally importantexhibition held at the Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane, Australia. I discuss the general installation, entitled 1979, which refers to a pivotal year in Cambodian history. Telling “a story of a time in [his] childhood just at the end of the Khmer Rouge period,” Pich presents a monumental grouping of sculptural objects made of his signature bamboo and rattan held together by metal wire. I question the recent strategic use of narrative in his practice. Secondly, I discuss economic and political relations between Việt Nam and Cambodia to provide context for these artists’ interventions. As I’ve stated, modernity’s traumas echoes historical trauma . Yet the buzz regarding development in Việt Nam and Cambodia is laudatory. I delve into the regional socio-political and cultural ramifications of these infrastructural developments from foreign powers, particularly China’s impact on art and commerce in Việt Nam and Cambodia. Third, I analyze Phan Quang’s “translations” of rural Vietnamese subjectivity in his October 2010 solo show at Galerie Quynh. Through lush large color photographs and site-specific installations documented on video, he comments on the breakneck speed of change Việt Nam’s urban and rural areas. Phan was born to farmers in Bình Định province and now lives and works in Sài Gòn. He is the embodiment of the blur between countryside and city. The city represents modernity and the countryside symbolizes tradition. In recent Vietnamese blockbusters, the gleaming fast-paced metropolis is a site of both open pride and hidden temptations. In past propaganda, rural life stands for communist ideals of labor and equality. Abundant fields of rice in tourist ads evoke Việt Nam’s “hidden 38 charm”—an exotic, Edenic getaway (Kennedy and Williams). Although Việt Nam’s rural landscape is seen as timeless, it is undergoing vast changes. Governmental land- grabbing and lump-sum payments for citizens to resettle illustrate some pitfalls of rapid growth. Pich and Phan grapple with the urban and rural upheavals caused by rapid infrastructural change. I assert that Pich’s and Phan’s translation of these issues are (self-) exploitative gestures. I then segway to briefly highlight Đỉnh Q. Lê’s artwork on Agent Orange, first conceived in 1989 as kitschy souvenir objects sold in a Sài Gòn market stall and then presented again for a 2009 group exhibition in Germany. Lê’s Damaged Gene piece deals with trauma tourism as well as the lingering damage to bodies of land and human bodies caused by dioxin. All three artists make work tied to geographic locale, a strategic move which has benefits and drawbacks discussed in the chapter. I conclude by reconsidering the frameworks by which the traumas of modernity is represented, both creatively and critically. 5. Return: ProduceVerdict (Conclusion) Trauma returns unexpectedly. It is September 2011 and I will soon leave Phnom Penh for Orange County, only to return again, date unforeseen but certain. Return is both departure and arrival. This time I leave with a heavy heart for many reasons. Let me tell you a story about leaving and return. On August 20, 2011, I attended a fundraising screening for a feature film entitled Lost Loves (2010) by Chhay Bora, Cambodia’s first independent film producer. The film 39 is based on the life story of Chhay Bora’s mother in-law, who survived Pol Pot’s nightmarish regime. The main protagonist is shown leaving Phnom Penh by foot in 1975 with her father, three daughters, son, and brother. All of their possessions are carried in a suitcase, which is eventually abandoned. Paper money litters the streets like confetti— currency no longer has value. Phnom Penh is abandoned in a mass exodus. Along with other “new people” from the city, they work in Khmer Rouge-controlled countryside communes with “old people”—rural villagers. During the course of the movie, she loses her family one by one. An infant daughter dies of illness. Her father is killed for being an intellectual. A brother is bludgeoned to death for taking extra food. Enduring grueling labor and loss after loss, she eventually returns by foot with her remaining daughter and son to Phnom Penh in 1979 after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Earlier that day, I come across a striking image by Berlin-based conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper. In the picture, a young bright-eyed Caucasian man gazes into a mirror. Hennaed backwards on his forhead and reflected in the mirror is the phrase “Everything will be taken away.” For this open-call project, the artist invited strangers to live with this crimson text on their faces until the dye fades, and write their reactions in a journal. 21 Henna is the color of dried blood. It is a meditation on suffering and impermanence. Everything will be taken away. While watching Lost Loves, I kept on thinking, Everything will be taken away. When you have nothing, what is left? The tragedy is unrelenting. A visiting gallerist, Keng from Singapore, praised the tear-jerker’s high production value but criticized it for being too melodramatic. Tevy, a Khmer painter, told me that her family too, had to leave 40 Phnom Penh by foot and eventually ended up in Battambang because of the forced evacuation. She confided that an uncle had died because he was educated. It was too difficult to watch, she said. I agreed. We half-joked that we would have been killed because we both wore glasses. During a scene of starvation, she told me that older family members recounted the unsufferable years of labor and cruelty. Unhygienic conditions caused rashes; worms crawled out of their skin. I am reminded of my uncle’s stories of his time in a Vietnamese concentration camp and his skeletal friends who died one by one—from starvation, from illness, from overwork. Everything will be taken away. In another time and place, I scan the faces of survivors, the real-life counterparts of Lost Loves sitting in the Extraordinary Chambers of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, far from the center of Phnom Penh. They are witnesses of the prosecution. One can read years of lack on their faces. Everything will be taken away. One woman’s dry lips are the color of dried blood. Coming from the city and the countryside, these witnesses hope to find justice. The humid circulated summer air feels like a suffocating shroud. Outside the courtroom, construction cranes lift their silver necks skyward, impervious. As I write this in August 2011, the United Nations-sponsored Khmer Rouge Tribunal is still under way. On June 26, 2011, I attended the first day of the public hearings for Case 002, in which the four top leaders of the Khmer Rouge are put on trial. The ailing, elderly defendants include Pol Pot’s second in command, Nuon Chea, 84; past head of state Khieu Samphan, 79; former minister of social affairs Ieng Thirith, 79; and her husband Ieng Sary, 85, who was the foreign minister. All maintain their innocence. 41 Speaking on the behalf of Nuon Chea, Dutch defence lawyer Michiel Pestman said that the Case 002 investigation had been “unfair” and called for the proceedings to be “terminated.” In an unexpectedly convincing argument, Pestman questioned the very framework of the trials and the efficacy of its research teams. He demanded, “Why were American bombings not investigated? And the dubious role of the Vietnamese? Is the court trying to bury history?” Pestman argued that the trial does not take in the whole picture of what happened, including the circumstances of the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power and its aftermath. Instead, the tribunal has selective blinders on. He stated that the United States should also be accountable. There needs to be a balanced perspective. Wartime legacies linger in Southeast Asia and America. The effects of empire differ for refugees, Khmerican deportees, and Vietnamese and Khmer nationals. Crater ponds—the result of U.S. bombs—dot the Khmer countryside. The impact of the Việt Nam War, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and the subsequent Vietnamese government intervention must also be considered. I find myself agreeing with Pestman’s critique that Cambodia then and now is not divorced from the U.S. or Việt Nam. Cambodia does not exist in a geopolitical vacuum. U.S. dollars are used more often than the official riel in Cambodia. Vietnamese businesses crowd the streets of Phnom Penh. The trial will not and should not be terminated. There has to be a semblance of justice, however limited and blind. Cambodians are variably disinterested, disillusioned, and anxious about the return verdict—a distant horizon. During lunch break at the trial, I see cameramen and journalists swarming around painter Vann Nath, one of the few survivors of the torture prison Tuol Sleng. I 42 immediately recognize his shock of white hair and handsome, calm visage from documentaries and news articles. For him, too, everything has been taken away—his wife, his children, his world as he knew it. Outside the courtroom, he is the still center of the storm. After break, I try to find him in the rows of seats. He is gone. But tomorrow he will come back. Day after day victims and perpetrators arrive and depart. Day after day the prosecution and the defense offer elaborate rational legal arguments. But this is not adequate for those among us who have lost everything. Nothing suffices. Why come back again and again? Let’s return to the heart of the matter. 43 Chapter One The Art Part: Vi ệt Ki ều Artists, Divides, and Desires in Sài Gòn I had found the address of the Sài Gòn home where I was born from my uncle, Cậu Út, who barely survived grueling years spent in a Vietnamese reeducation camp. Growing up, my mother had wistfully described our house as being airy with marble floors, a refuge amidst turmoil. I have not returned to this house in thirty years, since I fled Việt Nam with my mother on a raft at the age of three. Late one damp night I took a taxi to find it. It was a fifteen minute drive from the guesthouse I was staying at. I wanted to see it for my mother, who had never returned. In visiting, I hoped that things would suddenly make sense, become crystalline, like putting on a pair of glasses. My mother’s quiet rage and sadness, my misapprehensions and adolescent volatility, our gulfs—this was all a blur to me: bleary black and white family photographs. I cannot discern what happened before, after, and in between history and memory. I wanted to see what she conjured in her mind’s eye day after day, decade after decade. Our first and last home in Việt Nam is now a narrow storefront bridal shop. The upper floors were used as a residence, as many family-owned businesses were. The front was closed up for the night. It was nothing like I had imagined, this nondescript place I had no connection to. About to knock and ask to look around, I also wanted to know about the current residents’ lives. Realizing these were odd requests, I stopped myself from interrupting the strangers living in my old home. After quickly strolling around the block, I drove away on surprisingly empty rain-slicked streets. 44 Some say retrospective vision is perfect, but I am left with blind traces. This return did not feel like a reckoning, a respite, a homecoming. The gulfs in memory and history remain. In an uncanny essay, Salman Rushdie writes of visiting his childhood home in Bombay, haunted by an old black and white photograph, after an absence of three decades. He also stands in front of his former home, his presence unknown to its current inhabitants. Memory, desire, and loss merge. Rushdie notes, “we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost . . . we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands . . .” 22 Our real and imaginary homelands are mere fictions, implausible creations—artifice and art. Following current reformulations of diaspora, I reframe subject positions and notions of home to allow for a multiplicity of movements and identifications. Although disappointed by my childhood home, frustrated by the gaps between inherited memories and reality, I am more at home in Sài Gòn than Hà Nội. Sài Gòn feels more cosmopolitan. Many of my Việt Kiều (overseas Vietnamese) friends stated that they felt more comfortable living there than Hà Nội. They bemoaned Hà Nội was too small and had fewer opportunities for employment. Other colleagues have defended Hà Nội’s charm, scenery, and vibrant cultural scene. The intersections of the personal and political account for these preferences. There’s no place like home. 23 This chapter focuses on returning artist-organizers who call Sài Gòn home and how they strategically gain critical visibility and commercial viability on international art markets. I argue that Việt Kiều artists’ contradictory, ambivalent identities as both “local” and “non-local” gives them greater prominence in the global art circuit. Diasporic artists 45 are regularly valorized as native artists within an international art scene which fetishizes “exotic” locations. Artists perceived as local get more prestigious shows, grants and residencies than their expatatriate counterparts. At the same time diasporic artists’ non- local education and cultural capital gives them greater access to funding and exhibition opportunities. Gallerists often downplay an artist’s returnee status to maximize fiscal returns through collectors’ and museums’ purchases. Instead of perpetuating foreign/ local binaries, I chart more nuanced networks of exchange and affiliation. Việt Kiều artists are both a part of—and set apart from—artistic and social communities in Việt Nam and abroad. Through the lens of artistic practice, I discuss translocal tensions and contradictions as the Vietnamese government changes its policies amidst rapidly growing skylines. First, I question my position as a non-local researcher/ curator/ artist with Western-centric aesthetic and theoretical biases. Secondly, a brief sketch of the contemporary art scene Việt Nam contextualizes artistic practice. Third, I discuss at length returning artists Tiffany Chung’s and Sandrine Llouquet’s creative practice in relation to shifting definitions of citizenship and identity in Việt Nam. Analyzing the hyped rise of Vietnamese contemporary art, I then note that new bull markets in emerging economies such as Việt Nam, China, and India build the foundation for new art markets. Fifth, I connect the limits Vietnamese female artists face in the art world with the systematic oppression minority women face on the global assembly line. Quickly surveying Việt Nam’s shift from military socialism to market socialism, I mark the global exploitation of colored female laborers. Within this discussion of gendered and raced 46 labor, I finally compare the various artistic strategies used by well-known Việt Kiều artists including Đỉnh Q. Lê, Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba, An-My Lê, and Liza Nguyễn in tandem with Sandrine Llouquet and Tiffany Chung. Keeping the politics of identity in mind, I look at how these diasporic artists are received and ranked within the art world. Throughout this chapter, I highlight heterogeneous temporalities and tensions at play: in the artists’ work, in the art scenes they inhabit, and in Sài Gòn—a city morphing at breakneck speed. The Art Part: Discursive Divides As a curator/ researcher/ artist in Việt Nam, I have preconceived notions of what conceptual art looks like, forged by my indoctrination into a particular hegemonic art world—the one of international biennials which privileges conceptual rigor over formal aesthetics, modeled on a teleological Western art history. This is an art history which occludes other art histories and movements. I realize my complicity in this project. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has written extensively about the interwoven, interdependent networks which produce and reproduce the “economy of cultural goods”: artists, art institutions, academics, critics, collectors, et al. 24 I am inextricably bound to these networks by the different hats I wear. As a male doctoral researcher at an American university, independent international curator, art collector, and conceptual artist I take part in all aspects of the economy of cultural goods. My privilege—education, cultural capital, gender, research funding, and American citizenship—puts me in an unequal standing with most of the subjects I write about, both local and diasporic artists. 47 My career is built upon showing and telling one part of the world about another. It is an act of translation—I interpret, filter, and judge local activities for an international audience. I try to make the periphery legible to the center. In doing so, I critique other curators, critics, and artists like myself; it is an act of hypocrisy. My privilege grants me authority to write about these artistic communities I have only begun to understand. I am called to represent Vietnamese artists to the rest of the world. Sometimes I am called to represent the rest of the world to Vietnamese artists. What constitutes Vietnamese anyhow? Insider/ outsider categories exist within and without the Vietnamese art community. As mentioned, Việt Kiều artists are both a part of the community, and seen as occupying a position apart from the community. Diasporic artists may have more fiscal resources, access to Western education and art discourses not so readily available to local artists. These diasporic artists, however, often identify as local. Sài Gòn-based artist, critic, and organizer Sue Hadju calls this “strategic global positioning.” Because many Việt Kiều artists produce work that is palpable to international curators, their work may receive more attention in exhibitions abroad. The inverse is also true, in which “Vietnamese” artists are singled out for institutional support at the exclusion artists who are not “native”— foreigners or overseas Vietnamese. Yet all of these artists call Sài Gòn home. Hadju is also critical of international “instant noodle curators” who “drop in for twenty-four hours, meet a few familiar names, then just add water.” She notes that double-edged curatorial criteria are often at play: “more articulate” returnee artists may overshadow their local counterparts, or “the standards of complexity, conceptualism, 48 criticality and originality de rigueur for overseas-educated artists [are more] leniently applied to locals, or trumped by market forces.” 25 Local/ foreign categorizations often determine who gets picked for prestigious art opportunities. Who claims status as a Vietnamese artist is a sensitive issue. Local Vietnamese artist are eager to ask about worldwide opportunities for funding, exhibitions, and residencies. Sometimes I can’t help these artists—the cultural and economic gaps are jarring. Their work falls short of arbitrary standards. Who am I to judge? Deficient in English language skills or art education, these artists and their work are unappetizing to foreign collectors, curators, and gallerists. These artists may lack the social connections to play the fickle game of international art. These inequities are same the world over. A few of the artists I discuss in this dissertation, however, are already superstars on the international art circuit. I have only begun to understand these communities. I am humbled. I am hungry to learn. I am hungry for knowledge, for opportunities, for education, for help. Perhaps this is a neocolonial relationship—I am here to speak for and to educate the “natives.” These local artists are also hungry for knowledge, for opportunities, for education, for help. It can’t be helped. This hunger is palpable. It eats me up. The consumption of art is tied to economic development. It is my job as a curator and critic to imbibe these cultural and political shifts in Việt Nam and dish it up to audiences afar. The Vietnamese government’s 1986 open door đổi mới (renovation) policy has spurred vast socioeconomic changes. The state has gradually shifted from a communist to a socialist-capitalist political economy over three decades. Việt Nam has 49 now embraced globalization—advertisements are everywhere. Foreign investment fuels the changing infrastructure of urban and rural areas. In cities like Sài Gòn and Hà Nội, construction is non-stop. The emerging middle class’ hunger for commercial products grows. There is not yet a significant local collector base for contemporary art. I expect this to change in time. The Post Vidai collection claims to be “the only collection in the world” focused on contemporary Vietnamese art. Its collectors envision “a new Vietnam as a diasporic community”—local and non-local is no longer relevant in this new world order. As Vietnamese cuisine has become a familiar global staple, auction houses are beginning to promote Vietnamese contemporary art’s distinctive flavors. Despite the global economic crisis and the country’s own recession, Việt Nam has been one of the fastest rising economies in Asia. 26 Dr. Lê Xuân Nghiã, Deputy Chairman of the National Finance Supervison Committee, stated that stimulus packages have helped curb the country’s recession and that the global slump may actually help boost the country’s GDP: As people in the world have seen their income go down, governments in the world have encouraged importing cheap products, including ones from Việt Nam. This really serves as the opportunity for Việt Nam to push up exports in the time to come. 27 Việt Nam’s entry into the World Trade Organization promises that future trade expansion will continue. 28 The increased international flows of tourism, commerce and culture in Việt Nam have profoundly affected the growth of contemporary art. 29 Coinciding with đổi mới in the late 1980s, Vietnamese artists began to cater to foreigners by producing Fauvist interpretations of serene landscapes, occasionally 50 populated by women in áo dài (traditional flowing dresses). 30 These lush palette knife paintings still dominate commercial galleries in Sài Gòn, Huế, and Hà Nội. Collectors’ desires for “authentic” Vietnamese art is readily supplied by artisans. Nonetheless, Socialist Realism and silk and lacquer paintings remain the dominant genres officially recognized by the state and featured in the national museums. There is relatively little government support for conceptual contemporary art. 31 Currently, all cultural productions and events must be screened and approved by government cultural committees. The government must balance its own desires for rapid modernization with the need to control political and cultural representations. The tension between capitalist market reform and socialist ideology become manifest in what kinds of imagery is permissable. Government censors do not allow politically sensitive artwork to be shown. There is no conceptual art education in the university system. Only academic lessons based on those established by the French colonial art system exists. Today art school curricula are dominated by formal lessons on line, composition, and color. What most contemporary local Vietnamese artists know about global art history and art theory is based upon their own research, study or residencies abroad, and a mostly informal network of salons and workshops. These networks are detailed in the following segment. Artists who have studied and lived abroad, including the diasporic artists I discuss in this chapter, contribute to the growing community dialogue about contemporary art. The following section overviews the artistic communities in Hà Nội and Sài Gòn, the two largest urban centers in Việt Nam with the most artistic activity and institutions. 51 Of Two Cities Most official government and cultural institutions are located in Hà Nội, the political capital of Việt Nam. It is medium-sized garden city with a population of 2.688 million (CIA World Factbook 2009). A large scenic central lake, Hồ Hoàn Kiếm, serves as a focal point for denizens. In the mornings and evenings, locals and tourists can be seen strolling, flirting or exercising on the lake’s perimeters. The huddled warren of little shops and homes flanking the lake in the historic Old Quarter contrasts with the rising skyscrapers on the outskirts of the city. There are future plans to expand Hà Nội, doubling its size. In the meanwhile, cultural organizations and galleries are sprinkled throughout the city. Foreign cultural institutions such as L’Espace (French cultural institute), 32 Goethe Institut, 33 and the British Cultural Council 34 have a range of cultural programming including a regular showcase of Vietnamese contemporary visual art. Socially engaged work is often supported and shown by these institutions. For artists, affiliation with an international organization often gives them some degree of artistic freedom. 35 The foreign investment in these cultural spaces is a form of outreach, positive public relations, a neo-colonial enterprise. Foreign language classes are offered; students are encouraged to study and/or work in the host institutions’ countries. These well- intentioned institutions also share Việt Kiều organizers’ impulse to build an artistic community and scene. They all aim to develop cultural discourse, to bring a bit of home abroad, to educate the locals, and to make space for non-locals and locals to network. It’s a civilizing mission, although it’s no longer couched in such loaded terms. Some argue these spaces are oases of cutting-edge culture. The presence of these foreign cultural 52 institutions is also a diplomatic tool to foster positive relations between Việt Nam and the given cultural embassy—good for trade, commerce, and political relations. Affiliated with the Hà Nội Fine Arts University, the Việt Art Centre 36 was opened on July 13, 2006 and has hosted exhibitions and events for contemporary Vietnamese and international artists, designers, musicians and architects. The University has also added video courses to supplement its retinue of academic art lessons. Galleries and artist-run spaces are a vital component of the cultural scene in Hà Nội. The pioneering Salon Natasha was opened in 1990 by late artist Vu Dân Tân and his partner, scholar and curator Natasha (Natalia) Kraevskaia in their studio/home. Although no longer active, it was the first private independent art space inViệt Nam to promote artistic experimentation. 37 Now other spaces and activities spearheaded by artists form a rich network. Trailblazing activity include workshops organized by local artist and organizer Trần Lương, Đào Anh Khánh’s performance extravaganzas, 38 and Nhà Sàn Đức —an artist’s “house on stilts’”which has served as a performance and exhibition space and a local artists’ hangout for over a decade. 39 Adding to the breadth of work shown are commercial galleries such as Art Vietnam Gallery, 40 Bui Gallery, 41 Suffusive Gallery, 42 Studio Thơ, 43 and Maison des Artes. 44 As the contemporary art scene emerged in Hà Nội in the late 1980s, in Sài Gòn there was not much activity. Within the past few years, art activity has been stirring in Sài Gòn. If Hà Nội is known as the cultural and political capital of Việt Nam, Sài Gòn is its economic center. Commercial gallery Galerie Quynh 45 and alternate spaces such as Sàn Art Independent Art Space and Zero Station 46 —founded by artist, scholar and curator Nguyễn Như 53 Huy—provide a diverse array of art exhibitions and programming. Himiko Visual Café 47 and L’uisine 48 combine commercial space with gallery space. Artist Rich Streitmatter- Tran’s dia/projects functions as an art archive, gathering space and the artist’s studio. 49 Foreign cultural institutions such as IDECAF (Institute of Cultural Exchange with France) 50 and British Council occasionally do cultural events, including a film series at IDECAF and concerts through British Council. These institutions have fewer programs, and hence a lesser presence in Sài Gòn than in Hà Nội. In the past, a little blah blah, an “artist run initiative,” organized artist talks, residencies, and exhibitions. Now a little blah blah has changed its focus to a single large project per year with related programming. 51 Art and music events are also organized by wonderful district, spearheaded by artists Bertrand Peret and Sandrine Llouquet, a dynamic husband and wife team. The following segments focus on Llouquet’s and Chung’s artistic practice and community involvement. I use their creative output as launching points to discuss liminal subject positions, citizenship, audience, and art world hierarchies. 54 It’s a Wonderful World Sandrine Llouquet was born in 1975 in Montpellier, France and attended art school in Nice and Sài Gòn. The artist creates unassuming drawings, site-specific installations and Flash animations that are simultaneously playful and evocative, hinting of wonder and wounds. 52 Her practice embraces these contradictory impulses, culling images and references from mass media, her personal narrative, collective memory and literature. Her images are at once familiar and unsettling—disjunctured, surprising, decontextualized. The presentation of her drawings and animations within complete installations point at the complexities of memory and representation, desire and lack, jouissance and despair. Referring to her body of work, Llouquet writes, “Each piece is a tentative . . . combination of the contradictory feelings which animate me, particularly violence and sweetness.” Violence and sweetness, ambivalence and liminality are at the heart of the artist’s practice. Trauma and kitsch, play and pathos are not polar binaries for Llouquet—they inform and transform each other. This ambivalence occurs in her personal life as well. The liminality of her subject position as a Eurasian artist is reinforced during her daily interactions in Việt Nam. Although Llouquet has lived in Sài Gòn for years, she is constantly reminded that she is not a local. Sandrine Llouquet notes that perhaps as the result of being a child of divorced Vietnamese-French parents, she has always felt like a nomad, occupying an in-between space, constantly reinventing herself. Llouquet’s parents emigrated to France when she was a child. She has lived in Việt Nam sporadically her adult life. As an adult, she writes 55 that she is in a state of “permanent detachment,” forever in flux. As an undergraduate, she was enrolled in the Hồ Chí Minh City Fine Arts University for a year (1997-98) because she wanted to learn lacquer painting techniques. To her dismay, Llouquet states that was segregated from the other students: I don’t know why, they [Hồ Chí Minh City Fine Arts University] never told me why, but I couldn’t take classes with the other students. Maybe because then I couldn’t speak Vietnamese that well, maybe because I was a foreign student. They let me enroll in all the classes I wanted, but they gave me my own instructor, my own classes. What I really wanted to do was to take the same life drawing classes, sit it on the rest with the students. At first I didn’t have any friends, I did my own thing. But then the more curious ones came by, said hello. Then we had conversations. 53 Llouquet still doesn’t quite know why she was set apart from the other students. The artist’s desire to “belong” and integrate is constrained by an institutional decision to give her differential—perhaps deferential—treatment. Llouquet’s experience at the Hồ Chí Minh Fine Arts University is a telling example of the ways overseas Vietnamese become assimilated yet segregated within the larger social fabric. Anthropologist Aihwa Ong uses the term “flexible citizenship” to highlight how transnational subjects strategically position themselves within their chosen residence, whether temporary or permanent. These “flexible citizens” maintain privileges yet elide full responsibilities as citizen subjects. For example, Ong notes how the Chinese government hails its diasporic subjects with patriotic“prodigal son”rhetoric. 54 Overseas Chinese—even “ABC,” American-Born Chinese—are encouraged to return to their motherland to assist in its development. The Vietnamese government also uses similar rhetoric in which the 3.6 million Vietnamese abroad are encouraged to resettle in 56 Việt Nam to help build the country’s infrastructure and future. These transnational subjects are marked as a desirable Other with foreign expertise, yet also welcomed as a natural, and perhaps in time, naturalized extension of the national body politic. Việt Nam’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Phạm Gia Kiêm issued a 2007 statement which highlights connections to homeland and minimizes political, generational and geographic divides: “Wherever they are and irrespective of generations, young or old, male or female, political views, religions, ethnicity, and stories of the past, Vietnamese expatriates always turn to their country of origin.” 55 The Vietnamese government has not always been so welcoming of Việt Kiều in the 1990s. Seen as “traitors,” overseas Vietnamese were treated with suspicion: Việt Kiều were harangued at the workplace; business owners subject to all-too-frequent inspections; diasporic and foreign investors immobilized by red tape. 56 In Llouquet’s case at the Hồ Chí Minh City Fine Arts University, she was both welcomed as a potentially productive citizen-subject and “quarantined.” In this instance the artist did not have control of how she was situated within the institutional setting. Llouquet’s “permanent detachment” may be a way to resolve this conundrum, a refusal to be placed, confined, defined. It is also a mark of cosmopolitanism: home is nowhere and everywhere. In Llouquet’s 2008 solo exhibition entitled Milk at Galerie Quynh in Sài Gòn, the “tentative combination” of sweetness and violence takes on complex, disquieting permutations and themes through seemingly simple, disparate elements. On the ground floor of the gallery, there is a cluster of individually framed, tenderly executed drawings 57 with touches of watercolor. There is also a “playground” of five large free-standing objects that the artist refers to as hybrids between sculpture and drawing—white silhouettes painted on clear plexiglass supported by white framed boxes. The whole effect resembles large vitrines, a parody of Damien Hirst’s disconcerting formaldehydes—instead of suspended animals, they are children. Figure 7: Sandrine Llouquet, Milk installation view, 2008 58 Figure 8: Sandrine Llouquet, Milk detail, 2008 As the young mother of an infant daughter, Llouquet covertly addresses maternal preoccupations and childhood wonders through art. On the second level, the viewer sees an ersatz red/pink puddle; enigmatic medium-sized drawings on plexiglass hang at eye level. An almost life-sized plexiglass cutout of a girl jumping, arms akimbo, is suspended from the ceiling. Turning the corner into an enclosed gallery space, one is affronted by another giant red/pink puddle cascading down the walls, oozing diagonally through the space. Within the same space, there is a near life-sized wall graphite drawing of a seated human figure with a jangled black and white video projection for a head. In a separate area upstairs, an intimate red/ pink colored room features another medium-sized plexiglass drawing, a desk lamp taped to the floor, and a small window that emits an eerie twilight. In the lower diagonal corners of this room, the paint has been chipped off, 59 resembling gaping wounds. An ambient, ominous soundtrack by artist Thierry Bernard envelops the upstairs gallery like fog. The show evokes frightening fairytales. The title Milk conjures a host of associations. Llouquet may have been thinking about mother’s milk or dairy milk. “Milky” is a synonym for spiritlessness, tameness or timidity. The playground and drawings on plexiglass have a “milky” opaqueness. A tenuous combination of wistfulness, foreboding, and childlike awe tinges the work. In a darker vein, the phrase “to milk a situation” speaks of extraction and exploitation. Violence and sweetness, trauma and tenderness oscillate in Llouquet’s oeuvre. Llouquet’s working process is spontaneous and intuitive, responsive to the physical space. The artist writes, “adaptability to a place and to a context is not only a quality necessary to a person in their daily life, but also to the contemporary artist in their work.” 57 Transformation and adaptation are recurring motifs in Llouquet’s work. According to the artist, her site-specific installations “adapt” to the strictures of a given location. Her work often transforms the physical gallery space. For example, she drilled a “river” into concrete gallery floors for a 2004 solo show in Bordeaux. 58 In a 2005 exhibition in Sài Gòn, she painted directly onto windows and walls, turning the entire space into a three-dimensional drawing. 59 The artist’s manipulation of a given space causes the viewer to feel simultaneously at ease and out of place, out of bounds, an uncanniness. 60 Figure 9: Sandrine Llouquet, Milk installation views, Galerie Quynh The artist is a longtime fan of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a tale in which ridiculous juxtapositions of the familiar abound. Within this childhood classic, the protagonist Alice undergoes repeated change and transformation. It is this state of limbo and disorientation that Llouquet’s work conjures. Milk is a wonderland of sorts. Referencing Carroll's novel, atelier wonderful was an experimental artists space in Sài Gòn that Llouquet co-organized with her partner Bertrand. Every week, for five months in 2005-06, atelier wonderful showcased a different artist project, including visual artists, architects, graphic designers and musicians. atelier wonderful has been reconfigured as wonderful district, which organizes art events in Việt Nam and abroad. 61 Wonder is an idea I'd like to explore further. Strangeness, surprise and curiosity underlie wonder. Suspension of disbelief may be another facet. During the Renaissance, “wonder cabinets” were immensely popular. These wunderkammers were collections of curiosities, microcosms of the known world; they were the predecessors to contemporary natural history museums. These wunderkammers were also wonderlands, miniaturized, contained. However, their purpose was to present a controlled, rational universe that its owner surveilled and controlled. The“wonder cabinets” and “wonder rooms” (rooms instead of cabinets filled from floor to ceiling with artifacts) of the European gentility expressed a curiosity about the known world and its dark recesses, a wanderlust to explore and exploit. The cabinets inspired wonder and morbid fascination. Llouquet’s playground (as well as the other components of Milk) can also be seen as a contemporary “wonder cabinet,” although the belief in a rational and moral order has been displaced by a postmodern disbelief, a questioning of (meta)narratives. Art historians Martin Jay and Anne Friedberg have noted that Enlightenment rationality and the quest for truth through categorization and representation—as exemplified by the wunderkammers—has been upended since the postmodern turn. During the Renaissance, paintings were seen as truthful windows on the world. The views from these “windows” were from a single vantage point. Using linear perspective, generations of artists attempted to faithfully represent three-dimensional reality on a two- dimensional plane. 60 Llouquet’s playground also formally resembles freestanding windows (if not cabinets or vitrines). Conceptually, however, they do not provide accurate “truthful” representations of the world at large; any notion of Cartesian truth is 62 called into question. Linear perspective is merely a game. The lines upon which some of the playground figures rest—conjuring a road, a perch, a horizon line—are actually three- dimensional elements. The viewer’s initial grasp of the image becomes altered as these lines shift in space; the original image cannot hold, things fall apart. Although a strand of narrative can be traced within Milk, as well as in Llouquet’s other works, it is fragmented, disjunctured, nonsensical. Yet in its illogic lies a logic, a fantastical topsy-turvy realm, much like Alice’s wonderland. With deft visual wit, Sandrine Llouquet plays with form and content. She views the exhibition space as a blank space, a piece of paper. In the White Noise series of drawings on white plexiglass presented as part of Milk, the artist deals with spatial relations. Using the planar surface of paper as a subject matter within the drawings, the artist cleverly comments on representation and reality. The surface of paper becomes a subject within the drawings, transforming within the series into a platform, a ledge with which human subjects interact. Llouquet is interested in visibility and invisibility, voids and gaps. Negative spaces within a picture plane or empty spaces within the gallery are also important. The tensions between representation and abstraction is also a concern in Llouquet’s work. As noted, figures and objects disintegrate, mutate. Picture planes shift. Illogic prevails. The projected jumble of black and white lines are mutant abstractions, released from the tyranny of rational imagery. The “white noise” of the projection also signifies a break down of representational logic. Linear perspective, linear logic and linear narratives are scrambled. The teleological logic of modernity in Việt Nam is also 63 scrambled. The artist comments on the white noise of advertising, soap opera plots, and government messages on Việt Nam’s national television stations. Llouquet’s subtle, contemplative work straddles—and questions—the borders between sweetness and violence, form and content, fantasy and nightmare. Việt Nam’s communist utopia—a proletariat fantasy–for some devolved into a nightmare realm of physical and psychic privations. The two dominant colors of the exhibition—white, and what I have been referring to as red/pink—take on different registers within Milk. The gallery walls are painted white and a light grey. One is not quite sure if the light gray areas are architectural shadows of the white walls; this subtle intervention adds to the sense of unease. Within Western contexts, white often conjures innocence and purity. Within many Asian cultures, however, white is the symbolic color of mourning. Colors take on specific, often gendered, meaning in Vietnamese culture, associated with feelings or moods. Nora Taylor notes, “red is a symbol for love, blue means hope, yellow is associated with Buddhism, purple means loyalty . . .” and so on. 61 Llouquet straddles both East and West in her spare exhibition palette. The recurring reddish-pinkish blobs on the floor and walls register as syrup or melted candy, an otherworldly waterfall, anthropomorphic shadows. The shiny blobs may also be outsized pools of nail polish or blood. The saccharine becomes sinister. The red/ pink room with the gash in the paint—perhaps these are traces of trauma, abuse. There are monsters outside and inside. The monstrous and mundane are inexplicably bound in Llouquet’s work. At first glance, Llouquet’s work appears lighthearted; the subject matter banal. Upon closer 64 inspection, the mundane becomes monstrous, mutating as the viewer’s perception shifts. In the cluster of small framed drawings, a black rabbit with red eyes balefully stares out among the other mostly sweet yet mysterious images. Figures throughout the exhibition are in some way injured, or perhaps they are mutants. In the playground of white silhouettes, figures are disfigured, disjointed, limbless, headless. White upon white. The limbless, disfigured figures throughout the show bring to mind the spectacularized images on display at the War Remnants Museum in Sài Gòn of those affected by Agent Orange doing everyday activities, or victims of war one encounters in urban and rural Việt Nam. Specters of historical trauma become contained within Llouquet’s shadow- boxes. 62 Llouquet’s anomalous, anonymous figures in her other drawings are in the process of becoming, transforming, mutating, healing. Theorists Deleuze and Guattari conceive of “becomings” as mutants—they use vampires and werewolves as examples. Llouquet’s humans are also mutants, “becomings”: A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification…To become is not to progress or regress along a series…becoming does not occur in the imagination …[Becomings] are perfectly real. 63 Llouquet’s silhouettes and figurative drawings of “becomings” are not merely figments of the imagination, they are real, archetypical. They are uncanny: familiar and unsettling (Freud, 247). 64 These human representations are neither progressing nor regressing within fictional, scientific or historical narratives; they simply are. 65 I extend Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming” to both Vietnamese local and diasporic subjects, as well as Việt Nam as a nation-state. Việt Nam and its denizens are also in the process of becoming, transforming, mutating, healing. I argue that as Việt Nam changes, categories such as diasporic, local, and foreigner are no longer constructive categories. The trope of “becoming” more accurately pinpoints the changing identities of local and expatriate subjects. Becomings reject “the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes” (238). The terms “diasporic” and “local” are no longer fixed. A multiplicity of migrations—physical and psychic—destabilize these terms. Discussing political flux and potential, anthropologists João Biehl and Peter Locke use the concept of “becoming” to open up ethnographic approaches. Adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical frame alongside ethnography, I chart cultural and socio- political changes in Việt Nam. Deleuze and Guattari make a distinction between molar and molecular identities. Molar identities are stable constructs, “fixed in being, able to be grasped as a whole, recognized within the current social formation” (Vint 287). In this section, I maintain that citizenship, even dual citizenship, is a molar identity formation. In contrast, molecular identities are in constantly fluctuating, and “offer the possibility for transforming identity and society” because of its shifting nature (Vint 287). Molecular identities are becomings—they exist in a liminal state. Becomings emerge on a molecular, not molar level. Within a modernizing state, new identities are forged, new ways of being within a global economic order (Rofel). These changes occur on a molecular level—Việt Nam’s market socialism is a dramatic mutation from its earlier socialist genetic codes. Vietnamese locals are no longer represented as a molar, unified 66 proletariat fighting for a common good. They are becoming individual consumers with discrete desires and wants. Case in point: propaganda has been largely displaced by target marketed billboards throughout the country. These distinct desires are manifest in emergent molecular identities, evident in the traces of feminist discourse and queer representation in literature, online, and in movies. These metamorphic identities are marked by ambivalence, varyingly embraced and abhorred in popular discourse. Việt Kiều are ambivalent subjects. Uncanny presences, returnees are both foreign and familiar. They are reminders of painful pasts and embodiments of hopeful futures. Freud states that “the uncanny [unheimlich] is something that is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and returned from it” (230). 65 Many overseas Vietnamese left in dire circumstances, only to come back as unattainable visions—and at times false caricatures— of success and achievement. First rejected as traitors and then embraced by the Vietnamese government, Việt Kiều embody the uncanny aspects of repression and return. They are increasingly a part of the national Vietnamese imaginary yet remain set apart. Việt Kiều disrupt the molar binary poles of local and foreigner. In personal interviews, several Việt Kiều were distraught over double standards: foreigners received better service. At the same time Việt Kiều are criticized for not being “Vietnamese” enough. They must negotiate these dual molar identities—expatriate and Vietnamese. Double trouble. Doubling is also a hallmark of the uncanny: the same but not quite. Elaborating on the uncanny, Freud states there is a “doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self.” Việt Kiều are the same but not quite. Local and overseas 67 Vietnamese mirror each other with parallel histories, parallel lives. We are doubled and divided. We are a part of each other, yet torn apart. As a returning Việt Kiều, I was haunted. Doubled over with grief, confusion, rage at inequities. Double standards on both sides. I wondered, Who would I be if my family stayed? I saw uncanny glimpses of myself on the street: office worker, street vendor, business-man, manual laborer, money-boy. I would not have the money to attend college, since my parents worked for the old regime. Several uncles spent years in reeducation camps, unable to provide for their families, returning as shrunken husks of men. I may not be educated beyond twelfth grade, as most of my young family members who stayed. Some cousins toil fields; some others are well off, business savvy. Who knows? One thing is certain: I would not be as over-educated and privileged as I am today. Yet the boundaries between local and diasporic increasingly blur. Younger generations have no memories of war, of poverty. As Việt Nam modernizes and adopts molecular identities, disparities fade, bygones are bygones. At least that’s what official rhetoric states. There is a new saying, “Việt Kiều không có cửa”—an idiom proclaiming that Việt Kiều are no longer on top. Locals have surpassed them in prestige and wealth. The divides are interchanged. Now we are peers, doubles. I am your mirror. We are becoming each other. Việt Kiều and Vietnamese subjectivity is transforming into something else in the new global economy. Dualities are gone. Or are they? New forms of citizenship encourage Việt Kiều to settle in Việt Nam, to officially become part of the nation-state. They are encouraged to adopt molar identities and become “recognized within the current social formation.” Migrants are hailed as subjects, 68 indoctrinated/ interpellated, and enfolded within the nation-state’s molar logic. 66 Việt Kiều’s unstable position, however, mark them as the ultimate “becomings.” Effective July 2009, the Vietnamese government approved dual citizenship for overseas ethnic Vietnamese and certain categories of foreigners who benefit Việt Nam through their work in science, national security, defense or economic development. 67 This amendment revokes the 1998 Nationality Law which banned dual citizenship. 68 Dual citizenship applies only to expatriates and the foreign-born offspring of a Vietnamese parent(s), granting them “all rights of citizenship"; in return, they "must obey all citizens' duties towards the state and society according to its laws." 69 It sounds straightforward enough. Dual citizenship for non-locals is an outgrowth of the overseas Vietnamese visa exemption decree, launched September 1, 2007. Trần Thất of the Ministry of Justice stated that “the new law meets the desire of many overseas Vietnamese to retain Vietnamese citizenship.” 70 The new legislation affirms the logic of flexible citizenship: Việt Nam’s (elite) citizens are afforded even more mobility of movement and leeway for capital accumulation and investment. Why do Vietnamese who fled the communist regime decades ago desire to be a part of it now? Why would a cosmopolitan desire dual citizenship? Many expatriates still retain close ties to their homeland, sending remittances to relatives in the country. If they do not have blood relations, many Việt Kiều now have business relations. Dual citizenship mitigates the hassle of reapplying for visas and visa extensions, and allows for greater investments and property ownership. Currently Việt Kiều can own only one house, with rare exemptions: long-term investors, cultural experts and scientists who are 69 part of the nation’s rebuilding efforts. 71 Dual citizens, like any Vietnamese citizen, would be allowed to own several homes. 72 The government still owns the land. Currently, Việt Kiều without Vietnamese citizenship are allowed to purchase a single home after residing in the country for six months. As of 2008, only 150 returning Vietnamese have bought homes in Việt Nam. 73 The government makes concerted efforts to build and maintain strong connections with overseas Vietnamese, even if it means reversing older policies. Why double back for former “traitors”? For starters, Việt Kiều are still cash cows—in 2008, they sent $6 billion worth of business back to Việt Nam. The government enthusiastically encourages foreign investment, resettlement, and tourism. 74 Overall, these efforts are successful. According to the Vietnamese government, only 8,000 Vietnamese expatriates visited in 1987 whereas over half a million visit yearly today. 75 Overseas Vietnamese are no longer treated with suspicion; their expertise and capital is viewed as integral components of the country’s modernization. These moves strengthen nationalist sentiment and ties to the “motherland.” The government’s offer of dual citizenship is also a way to further stimulate economic growth and draw diasporic Vietnamese into its nation-building project. It both reaffirms the psychic and geo-political bounds of the nation-state and recognizes the border-less flows of capital. Phạm Gia Kiêm states, “No matter where, all the sons and daughters of the Vietnamese nation long to be back to their motherland and reunite with family, friends to engulf themselves in and share all the successes of the country’s cause of ‘đổi mới” (reform and renovation) [sic].” But just exactly how the “sons and daughters of the Vietnamese nation” from afar will “share” and participate in “success,” 70 and the terms of their participation—framed by regulations and laws—are still being debated, point by point. Despite attempts to incorporateViệt Kiều, their status is still uncertain, open to dispute. These returnees defy fixed molar positions in Việt Nam’s social order. New forms of belonging and citizenship entail new responsibilities. With the privileges of dual citizenship—including voting—also come banal duties such as conscripted military service for men of a certain age. The same goes for their offspring. 76 There are grey areas. Some overseas residents may be exempt from military service, depending on their location. The level of participation in voting is yet to be decided. As the Director of the Department of Justice Administration of the Ministry of Justice Trần Thật put it, voting rights for these flexible citizens will be “flexibly regulated by specific laws.” 77 The exact details of these revised laws are still unclear. The expected roles of returning Vietnamese are still ambiguous. They are the same, but not quite. Disagreeing with equal property benefits proposals, Deputy Chairman Nguyễn Đục Kiên stated in a March 2009 National Assembly meeting concerning new laws for Việt Kiều that they “were an indispensable part of the nation, but responsibility, duty, rights and benefit for people at home and overseas Vietnamese were different.” They are a part of the social fabric yet set apart. Trần Thật echoes this sentiment, stating in a Tuỗi Trẻ newspaper interview, “We have to accept the reality that a Vietnamese citizen overseas cannot carry out the same obligations as those in Việt Nam.” These tensions reveal again the unstable position of Việt Kiều within Vietnamese society. Their economic and educational privilege is welcome in certain instances, but must be curtailed, contained, and controlled. Again, 71 double standards? These new stipulations concerning the country’s new dual citizens and returning citizens are still being disputed, negotiated, formed—legal acts becoming lived actions. Legal strictures and state structures define molar identities. In doing so, internal politics and external market forces are contained. Việt Kiều problematize this equation since they are domestic and foreign figures. Their uncertain status reflects Việt Nam’s ongoing uncertainty on how to balance domestic concerns with foreign influence. 78 Việt Nam is in precarious shape. Becomings are shapeshifters. Việt Nam’s new global(ized) citizens—returnees, foreigners, and locals—must constantly reshape their molecular identities as the country reinvents itself. For returnees and select foreigners, the government’s offer of dual citizenship is extension of flexible citizenship, in theory and practice. As Ong presaged, “New strategies of flexible accumulation have promoted a flexible attitude toward citizenship.” Transnational capitalism demands strategic subject positions which transcend geo-political boundaries. Vietnamese elites utilize flexible citizenship to their advantage. These becomings include foreign investors, intelligentsia, government officials, and Vietnamese local and diasporic entrepreneurs. In short, those with real and cultural capital benefit on the new economic frontier. Việt Nam’s socialist-capitalist economy is a desirable and dangerous mutant. The country’s molecular identity has recombinant DNA—strains of capitalism and socialism. The country’s rapid development is a social experiment, both very carefully controlled and veering out of control. Lions and Asian Tigers and bear markets, oh my. The reigns of free market enterprise and its attendant processes are variably unleashed and controlled 72 by the Vietnamese government at different points in time. As Vietnamese mass media warns, growth must be tamed. Otherwise, capitalist and consumerist desires become monstrous. What is Việt Nam becoming? The following segment discusses Tiffany Chung’s two art series that address what Việt Nam and its citizens are becoming. My analysis of the maps series questions the logic of progress and connects cartographic and colonial impulses. Through the Play series, I argue that modern Vietnamese citizens are not merely play-acting and mimicking first-world models and their pastimes, but are forging alternate subjectivities. I also critique the manner in which “Vietnamese” artists such as Chung gets fetishized within a global art market. 73 Map Quest Born in Đà Nẵng, Tiffany Chung received her MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 79 An artist who has lived in Sài Gòn for the past decade, Chung identifies as local. She utilizes a pop sensibility to capture the essence of the vibrant city life of an increasingly urban–and urbane–Việt Nam. The artist’s pastiche installations often combine photography, sculpture, and video. Her photographs often employ the same visual vocabulary and materials found in her installations: polystyrene, polyethylene foam, MDF. Exuberant fashion-like images feature wondrous poses of subjects with coordinating backgrounds and outfits in shallow space riding bikes, wrestling with oversized objects, going on a mysterious journey. Highly stylized sculptural objects reference street vendor carts, gas stations, and so on. Her work offers a new vision of space and place—a candy-colored utopic, and hyperreal fantasy which displaces the historical, documentary images of a traumatized topography. Chung foregrounds excess, consumer culture, surface and questions the distinctions between public and private space, cultural adaptation and economic aspiration, performativity and pleasure. Perhaps because of her palatable pop aesthetic, Chung has exhibited widely, within and without Asia. 80 In Chung’s recent series of works on paper, entitled maps, the artist uses urban planning, city and subway maps as a starting point to create abstract, intricately detailed large-scale renderings. The images are comprised of colorful dots and lines that form patterns, shapes. The forms almost morph before one’s eyes, turning and turning. Mapping is a form of knowledge, a way to exert control over the known universe, a way 74 to chart development. Cultural theorist Graham Huggan notes, “maps are neither copies or semblances of reality but modes of discourse which reflect the ideologies of their makers.” 81 The cartographic gaze extends the limits of human vision, makes the unknown known. Yet things fall apart. The artist notes that the project aims to examine the cultural and spatial transformations linked to economic development that are taking place in the outer areas of Sài Gòn where rural and urban intersect. I'm interested in observing the urbanization process that is going on here while relating it to some new cities developed in the past twenty years in other Asian countries. 82 Indeed, Việt Nam is in the midst of historic, breakneck development. The country is transitioning from a largely rural economy to an urban one, and also shifting from a state-run economy to a market economy. Following China’s urbanization, Việt Nam’s infrastructure is increasingly decentralized. 83 Urban sociologists such as J. John Palen also note center-periphery models of settlement and development do not account for the organic, multi-centric growth and decline of urban, suburban and rural zones (financial districts, residential areas, commercial centers, and so on). 84 Sài Gòn is currently planning its decentralization, charting new financial, residential and educational zones. How does one make sense Việt Nam’s tremendous changes? How are they implemented, and charted? Chung’s “maps” resemble organic growth, perhaps mold or microorganisms growing in a Petri dish. For the artist, Việt Nam’s rapid economic development is both bounty and blight. What happens when utopic visions fail, become dystopic? Chung presents a candy-colored utopic universe as a verneer for dystopic realities. The artist occasionally culls images from Ebenezer Howard’s book Garden Cities of To-morrow. Howard is the 75 founder of the English garden-city movement, which sought to incorporate expanses of green within urban networks. 85 This movement had long-lasting impact upon urban planning throughout the world. Chung’s organic maps wryly comment on these utopic garden cities. These garden cities are exemplars of controlled growth. However, in Chung’s vision, this organic growth is over-ripe, perhaps decaying or festering. The maps also look fungal. Fungi are parasitic plants lacking true root and stem structures; they reproduce by spores. Chung claims this rapid urban development is parasitic—it lacks depth, roots, sustainability, structure. Whether it is parasitic or paradise, the urban center cannot hold. Representations of diasporic communities often use seed/ spore analogies and imagery. Upon closer inspection, Chung’s maps consist almost entirely of circles, dots. These dots can be viewed as spores, diasporic seeds scattered. Diasporic communities were conceptualized along home/ exile or center/ periphery axes, in which a community moves from a “homeland” to settle to other territories. Shifting away from this home/displacement binary, recent discussions account for multiply diasporic identities. Multiple movements and affiliations forms one’s being. 86 Chung’s own identity as a “diasporic” artist is questioned: yes, she emigrated from Việt Nam and settled in the States to live and study, but she has since lived in Japan, among other locales, and now currently calls Việt Nam home. Beyond simple conceptions of home/ abroad, older models of diaspora fail to “map” her movements and identifications. The overlapping dots in Chung’s maps speak of these ongoing movement and patterns of settlement— metaphorically and literally represented by the overlapping patterns. 76 The Empire’s New Clothes The system of economic exchange and development which fuels growth is fungus-like– opportunistic, parasitic. But it is not fungible–goods and services are not equally exchanged. Việt Nam has recently joined the World Trade Organization, which ensures future trade expansion and economic growth. I’m compelled by discources on modernity and development in East and Southeast Asian countries. While traveling in Asia, I would hear comments from others comparing Việt Nam to “more” or “less” developed countries such as Japan, Korea, Laos or Cambodia. I heard many times from locals and expats that South Korea looked like Việt Nam twenty years ago, or parts of Cambodia looks like Việt Nam fifteen years ago, and so on. I found these comparisons troubling—it assumed teleological narrative of development and progress. Modernity is not singular linear narrative, nor does it entail a single universal vision.Cultural anthropologist Lisa Rofel has argued for a framework of “discrepant modernities” which challenges universal/ local dichotomies in rhetoric on modernity, subject formation/ identification, and consumption. Being attuned to the fact that modernity is not a singular, uniform destination point can provide a richer conception of uneven and parallel socio- economic developments of nation-states across the globe. For instance, third worlds exist in first worlds and vice versa. Rofel questions discourses pertaining to modernity and its Eurocentric, homogenous and teleological assumptions. She advocates a conception which does not reify binaries between universalism and cultural pluralism. Instead of viewing modernity as “a singular certainty” or separate cultural space, Rofel acknowledges “discrepant modernities”—localized psychic and real spaces in which 77 relationships to modernity are articulated and contested. 87 Chung’s work also comments on the rhetoric of modernity and its elisions. Urban planning, various maps and utopic visions of development (including garden cities) all forward particular visions of controlled progress and order. Chung’s large drawing entitled 10.75ºN 106.6667ºE 1867/2007 (oil & alcohol-based markers on paper, 2007, 135 x 90cm) acknowledges these discrepant modernities. This image layers a 2007 Seoul subway city map, Tokyo Metro map, and an urban planning map for Sài Gòn in 1867, when Sài Gòn became part of the French colonial empire. Stripped of signifiers, the maps of Seoul, Tokyo, and Sài Gòn are indistinguishable. The layered maps form an abstract field of tinted lines and grids. It is an ordered cacophony of colored dashes, curves, corners and shapes. The past, present, and future merge. Chung connects imperial violence and contemporary globalization. Postcolonial critic Gerry Turcotte writes, Mapping and imperialism are linked. One is a signpost of the other’s presence, a signal of ownership as resolute as a planted flag . . . The cartographer’s gaze is a totalizing one, naming and organizing a “blank” space into knowable spheres . . . The cartographer’s eye/ I is invisible, concealed, transparent, just as the language of imperialism is presented as natural and universal . . . Maps are re/presentations, palimpsests, forgeries. 88 Is globalizing rhetoric regarding development another echo of imperialist discourse? Is this the empire’s new clothes? Việt Nam’s infrastructural development is funded in part by first world economies such as Japan, Korea and the United States as well as multinational corporate investments. Việt Nam’s growth echo past patterns of displacement, racialized hierarchies and socioeconomic disparity. Other works in Chung’s series also merge different maps from different eras. The palimpsest layers reveal the underlying assumptions of urban progress. The piled maps 78 and diagrams form a disorienting topography. The layering challenges the “singular certainty” of the original maps. Colonial ideology is overlayed with visions of modernity. There is no single, coherent vision, just cryptic terrain. The work’s intricate details sprawled seemingly endlessly renders this composite geography simultaneously tender and terrifying—a brave new world. In the following section, I discuss in depth Chung’s latest series inspired by anime and propaganda. Figure 10: Tiffany Chung, 10.75ºN 106.6667ºE 1867/2007 oil & alcohol-based markers on paper, 2007, 135 x 90cm) Popaganda Chung’s solo show at Tyler Rollins Fine Art, a New York gallery specializing in Southeast Asian artists, examines the unlikely interplay between contemporary pop culture—particularly Vietnamese youth culture—and historical North Vietnamese propaganda images. The work highlights the slippages between Việt Nam’s past wartime 79 rhetoric and the present moment’s culture of consumption. In short, Chung mines the relationship between Việt Nam’s painful past and pop-culture obsessed present. The communist propaganda images of heroic workers collectively fighting has been displaced by capitalist propaganda images of newly modern(ized) subjects in pursuit of individual pleasures. In both historical and contemporary moments, representation is at stake: it is a war of images, an attempt to win hearts and minds. The war-time propaganda images of happy, stalwart soldiers attempted to heighten morale and bolster sentiment against an imperialist American enemy. Today’s bright, smiling adverts ubiquitously pasted on the crowded streets of Sài Gòn, Hà Nội and points in between attempt to sell visions of “the good life,” another world order, another world over. Now it is the capitalist first world imperialists whom local Vietnamese are trying to emulate. Or are they? Love thy (former?) enemy. Power Play At first glance, Chung’s photographic images from the Play series are playful, colorful, idiosyncratic: young workers strike curious poses. Youth clad in vibrant jumpsuits dramatically angle their pool sticks or go “hunting” with a water gun and bullhorn—a surreal spoof of leisure activities and commodity culture. In other images, a gaggle of schoolgirls strut as if in a parade or in a music video. These schoolgirls highstep across a bridge in Phú Mỹ Hưng, a pristine suburban housing development also referred to as Sài Gòn South. They are heading on a mysterious and possibly sinister mission; their leader holds a megaphone. 80 Chung’s images also bring to mind contemporary avant-garde Chinese artists such as Wang Guangyi, the Gao Brothers, Sui Jianguo, Zhang Hongtu, among others (think “Mao Pop” or “Political Pop”) who often filter Chinese propanda and state iconography through a Pop Art lens to make wry, ironic political critiques. Chung’s work attempts to blur the boundaries between pop culture and fine art, fact and fiction. An earlier series featured Vietnamese pop star and heartthrob Lâm Trương as an intergalactic time traveler in a photographic comic book universe. Chung’s current body of work also culls influences from both Vietnamese propaganda and Japanese animation (anime) and comics (manga). These influences suggest simultaneous temporalities at play, as in her maps series. The bright blue, green, and orange uniforms in Chung’s photographs are a familiar sight on the streets of Sài Gòn: they are worn by various laborers who sweep the streets, pick up garbage, do construction work, manage traffic, and engage in other forms of manual labor. Most of them are employed by the government. However, the details render these “workers” and their activities non-sensical. They sport goggles, motorcycle safety helmets, nylon safety vests, as well as yield pool sticks, water guns, bullhorns, and tubes for carrying poolsticks. These poolstick tubes also resemble tubes for carrying artwork or drawings, often used by architects or artists. These props also hint at Western modernity—worker safety regulations, labor laws. In the work, there is a blur between communist representations of humans at work and capitalist depictions of humans at play. 81 What is the division between work and play? The line between the economic (work) and the aesthetic (play) is blurred. 89 Is this some Marxist critique about alienated labor and leisure? Perhaps the recurring megaphones may serve as a clue. Chung also has fabricated a giant fuchsia bullhorn sculpture covered in small pom-poms for this exhibition. My old apartment in Hà Nội overlooks Công Viên Lenin, a public park. Blaring from permanently installed megaphones dotting the park, tango music jolted me up from sleep everyday at six a.m.Looking down from my balcony, I would see middle- aged couples gliding gracefully on linoleum, framed by swaying trees. Late afternoons spent strolling the streets near Hồ Hoàn Kiếm (Sword Lake), I was often startled from my internal reverie by the tinny sound of daily propagandistic messages (about duty, unity, and so on), followed by the national anthem transmitted by megaphones perched high on poles throughout the garden city. On the dense shopping plazas of Shibuya in Tokyo and Myeongdong in Seoul (Chung and I have lived in both cities), mini-dress-clad female salesclerks stand in front of stores yelling into their bullhorns about promotions over the techno beats thumping from boom boxes. An instrument for broadcasting to the masses, the bullhorn is used for radically different reasons. For Chung, the bullhorn is a symbol of power and play. Technologies of broadcast and power, and technology as a symbol— embodied by the bullhorn, safety vests and helmets, goggles—gestures at the tensions between communist desire for economic development and capitalist desires for economic exploitation. In Chung’s series, the outfits and props have both local and international referents. The subjects of her images are play-acting, but more specifically are engaged in 82 cosplay, short for “costume play.” Originating in Japan as kospure, cosplay is a subcultural phenomenon in which youngsters elaborately dress up as superhero characters from their favorite anime, manga, video game or fantasy film and re-enact scenes. It is a kind of performance art. In some instances, the participants simply just wear the costumes. Yet in Chung’s photographs there is no identifiable superhero; the only “hero” is the layperson. To recite socialist dogma, the true hero is the proletariat. Figure 11: top: Tiffany Chung, Be Cool Be Playful, 2008, 39 X 59 in Figure 12: bottom: 1978 Vietnamese propaganda poster 83 Vietnamese and Japanese youth become uncanny doubles, transgressing space nd time. One is becoming the (modernized) other. Cosplay in Việt Nam exemplifies discrepant modernities and competing temporalities at work (and play)—uneven and syncretised development. Việt Nam is regarded in Japan as an idyllic, exotic past. Japan is seen as Việt Nam’s future and idealized present. Japan is regarded as the model par excellence of Asian modernity, an economic and cultural superpower. Yet historically the North Asian country has been Việt Nam’s friend and foe. In the late twentieth century, Vietnamese nationalists went to Japan in pursuit of a model of resistance against Western colonizers, as well as foreign aid. 90 In 1941, imperial Japan, allied with the French in its fight against China, took control of Việt Nam, exploiting its natural resources (rice, rubber, minerals) for its war efforts. As Japan was defeated in World War II, Hồ Chí Minh declared Vietnamese independence. During the American War, Okinawa served as a B-52 base for American aircraft used to bomb Vietnamese civilians. 91 Today, Japan is one Việt Nam’s top foreign investors and supplies millions for infrastructural development. 92 Japan and Việt Nam’s complicated relationship is largely forgotten by cosplay youth. Going to my first cosplay fair with the artist in Sài Gòn, I was struck by the range of costumes as well as the blurring of gender and class divisions. Of course amply evident was the anime staple of sweet-but-sinister schoolgirls (which appear in Chung’s photographs) and dark brooding anti-heros with big spiky hair and ominous trenchcoats. Nonetheless, gender and ethnic cross-dressing 93 was commonplace. I couldn’t tell whether some of the cosplayers were male or female. 84 Vietnamese youth adopted the affects of their Japanese counterparts; time and space, fact and fantasy morphed. Chung notes: cosplay happens to be a perfect medium that allows [Vietnamese youth] the freedom of being individual and having alternate personas momentarily, that brings social norms into question. Although these teenagers can’t quite articulate their thinking and actions, this is certainly revolutionary in a society where critical thinking hasn’t been exactly encouraged. Although cosplay in Việt Nam isn’t exactly challenging state ideology, (hetero) normative paradigms are subverted. 94 On the surface, cosplay reaffirms traditional class and gender hierarchies, especially the caricatures of masculinity and femininity embodied in manga and anime. At the same time, cosplayers’ performative play challenges these social conventions. Figure 13: cosplay youth in Việt Nam 85 Cosplay in Việt Nam becomes a space where socio-economic and cultural borders are transgressed, suspended. The harsh realities of class, gender, and ethnic distinctions become amorphous. Local Vietnamese youth become global (superhero) citizens in this new world imaginary. Cultural theorist Arjun Appadaurai notes that through individual and collective imaginaries, communities are created across physical and psychic boundaries. The imagination is viewed as a “social practice”—not a fixed process— which allows for complex negotiations of space, temporality, and agency. 95 Through mass media, particularly film, music, and visual art, various collective subjectivities can be imagined, embodied. It is through cosplay that participants imagine new ways of being, different networks of affinity that cross the bounds and ideology of the nation- state. Following Appadurai’s framework on imagination, two seemingly discrete tropes such as war propaganda and pop culture are spaces in which individual and national bodies interpret and imagine their collective past, present, and future. Much of Vietnamese cultural and artistic output produced in the modern period prior to đổi mới has been government-sanctioned propaganda (Taylor). As noted, all cultural production including films, exhibitions, and events must be approved by the government. Chung’s recent body of work most likely cannot be shown in Việt Nam: the government censors would not approve of the reappropriation of propaganda images and the possible parody of the proletariat. Why have the laborers become so leisurely? Is the artist insinuating that the worker-hero is lazy, or corrupt? Artists living and working in Việt Nam such as Chung come up with different strategies for making and showing work. The artist’s work utilizes a glossy pop veneer to 86 make subtle socio-political commentary. When showing an earlier, related body of work for a group exhibition in Việt Nam at Galerie Quynh featuring pop sensation Lâm Trương as a comic book anti-hero, the artist downplayed any political critique, framing the photographic series instead as a spectacular live-action adventure. The work was presented as both a mixed media gallery installation and image inserts for a music album; the “comic book” images from the album were displayed as large prints in the gallery. Form was highlighted over critical content. The pop singer is presented as a protagonist in a narrative about a science experiment gone wrong. When examined closely, it is a thinly veiled jab towards Việt Nam as a socio-political experiment gone awry. When galleries such as Galerie Quynh surmise that the artwork they are presenting is too political, they occasionally do not apply for permission from the government for exhibitions, talks, or screenings: it is a calculated risk. Such exhibitions are listed for viewing “by appointment only.” If plainclothes cultural police stop by and audit unapproved work, the gallery may be heavily fined or closed. Galerie Quynh has been shut down before for not following proper licensing procedures for its facilities. Yet this aura of transgression may further both the gallery and the artist’s cache within an international art market. The question of censorship also points to audience. Galerie Quynh dubs itself “the most serious contemporary art gallery” in Viet Nam; its clientele consists almost entirely of foreign collectors not based in Việt Nam. The gallery panders to its non-local client base’s sensibilities by advocating the “think global, act local” mantra. The gallery claims to “promote education” for the local populace through artist talks and catalogs published in English and Vietnamese. 96 The mix of local and 87 international artist which the space showcases allows “the local community greater access to a diverse range of contemporary art practice.” The well-intentioned aim of educating the natives about cutting-edge (or ‘advanced’) cultural practices evokes civilizing missionary and colonial rhetoric. The Vietnamese art scene is still seen by local artists and foreign curators and collectors as lacking proper infrastructure and development. The byline of artists making transgressive work within a repressive regime can be a sexy sell, a provocative strategy which has catapulted artists from other regions (most notably China) to artworld superstardom and super sales. This is not to make light of the real dangers and risks that artists and institutions that support their work have to confront. I want to point out, however, that these artists and their dealers are also keenly aware of the markets that they are selling to. For artists on the “periphery” of art markets, their audience usually is not a local audience (since that doesn’t produce cultural or real capital), but rather a neoliberal cosmopolitan audience of collectors, critics, curators, and auction houses. The Play series is the artist’s most overtly “political” work to date. The hired photographer—a noted Vietnamese commercial photographer—for the Play series has refused to have his name associated with the project for fear that the images parodying propaganda may cause him to become blacklisted. He warned the artist that she was playing with fire. 97 In the Play catalog essay for her solo exhibition for Tyler Rollins, Chung has omitted direct textual references to the Vietnamese propaganda images she 88 works from, cautious of drawing overt connections even when exhibiting her work an ocean away. Super Markets In this segment, I reconsider the art market(s) in which Chung’s work circulates. Play is her first solo show in New York at a Chelsea-area gallery, in a highly competitive art market. Home to over fifty high-end galleries, the Chelsea area is known as the center of the New York gallery scene. As the center of the Western avant-garde art movement moved from Paris to New York after World War II, Chelsea is now arguably the “center” of the dominant art world. 98 Cultural centers form peripheries, marginalized status. Postcolonial critics such as George Yúdice argue that the idea of a single center is outdated. Now there are multiple commercial and cultural centers, with attendant peripheries. The United States of America’s post-WWII status the financial and artistic leader of the modern world is now questioned. The U.S. is now a faltering empire and new economic giants have emerged from its long shadow. Art and economics are linked. The World Bank predicts that India and China will the top two economic superpowers within the next few decades. China is currently the second largest global economy. 99 The power of art markets and art stars in both countries reflects this economic growth. The art world is shifting again. New York, Paris, and London are no longer the purveyors of what is considered “hot.” These cultural centers no longer dictate what works are worth. Hong Kong and Dubai have also become major players and purchasing sites, with auction houses holding regular shows in these locales. Journalist Matt Miller notes, “The art market has gone global . . . Russian 89 oligarchs, Chinese property developers and Indian industrialists are becoming as critical to the upper reaches of the international art scene as American hedge fund heads.” 100 These ascendant economic powerhouses have fueled the development of cutting edge art scenes and profitable art markets. Art markets follow bull markets. The artworld is similar to any other marketplace. Competition drives market economies and art markets. Bourdieu links economic and cultural development: capitalist desire for ever-new commodities and consumers parallels art-world desires for ever-new cultural commodities and collectors. 101 Other New York gallerists such as Ethan Cohen Fine Arts have cornered the market for “niches” such as contemporary avant-garde Chinese art. 102 High-profile living Chinese contemporary artists have fetched millions for a single work of art. Case in point: Beijing-based “Cynical Realist” Yue Minjun’s self-portrait sold for $7million at a Christie’s first Hong Kong auction in May 2008. 103 In these cartoon-like paintings, the artist is cloned endlessly in a single image. The bubble-gum pink clones all wear the same ironic grin, which can be read as a mocking response to China’s abuses and rapid development. 104 Minjun’s work is popular among foreigners looking for “political” art that would make a return on their investments. Within the past ten years, contemporary Chinese art’s prices skyrocketed. As a result, collectors’ interest has reached a plateau. This once emerging market has reached saturation point. Significantly cheaper, Southeast Asian art is now hyped as the next “hot thing.” Southeast Asian trade goods lays the foundation for Southeast Asian high art. 90 Over the past decade, articles from the International Herald Tribune to the New York Times have trumpeted the rise—and rising prices—of Vietnamese contemporary art. 105 Anticipating the surge in interest for Southeast Asian art, gallerists such as New- York based Tyler Rollins and Willie Valentine—who virtually has an empire of galleries in Singapore, Yogyakarta, Kuala Lampur and Manila—have chosen to specialize in Southeast Asian artists. Southeast Asian trade goods lays the foundation for Southeast Asian high art. Tyler Rollins roster includes Vietnamese, Thai, and Cambodian artists. Rollin’s description of his gallery states, “After many years of travel in the region, we have identified an impressive group of emerging and mid-career artists whose work we feel privileged to present to New York audiences, in many cases for the first time.” The gallerist is (self-) represented as an expert anthropologist or archeologist of sorts, discovering works from the exotic margins of the (art) world to share with a rarefied New York clientele “for the first time.” This hints at neocolonial discovery and conquest, the unveiling of unbeknownst cultural riches. Echoing the rhetoric of fin de siecle world’s fairs, the gallerist is both scavenger and cartographer, mapping out unfamiliar terrain and identifying the best specimens from far-flung locales. It may just be Rollins’ goal to discover—or establish the market for—a “great Vietnamese artist.” Bourdieu notes that a work of art is created “twice over,” first by the artist and then by the spectator (gallerist, critic, collector, museum-goer, etc..) and his society. 106 Artists and their artworks’ value is conferred by a given art world (which reflects that fickle audience’s aesthetic, cultural, and class interests). 107 Rollins and company—myself included— evaluate and translate artists and artwork the (third- or second-) world over for an international art audience. 91 Again the question is not one of discovering a “great” artist, but of acknowledging the cultural assumptions of what constitutes greatness and the systems which occludes certain gendered, raced perspectives (Nochlin, Taylor). “Our goal is to highlight the interconnectedness of today’s globalized art world,” the website proclaims. This multiculti statement acknowledges the shifting centers of the international art market and its art makers. Although the metonymic New York audience (read Western collectors) still holds the dominant gaze, the savvy Rollins—a former employee of Christie’s auction house—knows that buyers come in all globalized stripes. “We encourage artists, wherever they may reside, who explore the particularities of culture within a wider international context,” the site concludes. 108 Adopting a paternalistic stance of non-discriminatory encouragement, the politics of identity is enfolded within universalist tropes of inclusion, connectedness, and excellence. This language hides the tyranny of global market forces which take advantage of local labor and local production costs. Because artwork from Southeast Asia is still relatively cheap to produce and purchase, identifying and investing in “hot” talent from the region now will garner greater profit for both the collector and gallerist. Low overhead equals higher yields. The artist living and producing in the margins of the art world is still beholden— and must make work for—its center. This is not to insinuate a vampiric relationship between gallerists such as Tyler Rollins and his artists. Many diasporic artists including those residing in Việt Nam take advantage of the opportunity to get more bang for their buck. To produce artwork in a developing country costs a fraction of what it would take in first-world countries. For some, it is a strategy of 92 being able to live and make work as a full-time artist which would not be possible in other geographic locales. For instance the large-scale photographic prints Chung made for Play cost about $100 US to produce in Việt Nam. In the States such prints would cost ten times as much to make. Her photographic prints are listed around $9,000 US and drawings from $15,000US. Living and working in peripheral zones such as Việt Nam maximizes profits. Chung hires professional photographers, models, photo retouchers, videographers, and film editors for her video projects. It takes a proverbial Vietnamese village to make an art video. Other local and expatriate artists including myself also take advantage of the cheap, highly skilled labor in Southeast Asia. In order to utilize these services, the artist becomes a middle man of sorts. The artist must know the local language and customs, or have a translator, in order to manage an ambitious art project. It’s impossible to produce the same quality and quantity of work at the same low rate in the United States. Popaganda Chung’s series Play references Vietnamese propaganda posters produced during the American War in Việt Nam (1964-1973). One image of uniformed workers with face shields using elongated sticks to pour iron molds reads, “Sản Xuất Nhiều Canh Cho Tô Qưốc!” (Make More Cast Iron for the Country!”). In Chung’s renditions entitled “Be There or Be Square,” and “Be Cool Be Playful,” the workers are pool hall youth—pool is a favorite Vietnamese pastime. Another propaganda image features a male and female couple in side profile resolutely holding a shovel and an ax, with trucks, trains, and other forms of transport in the background. The text reads, “Chống Mỹ Cứu Nước” (Fight the 93 Americans, Save Our Country). The artist’s takes on this trope (such as “Be Loud, Make Sound”) contains no text within the image, just posturing with props. Similarly, Chung’s titles for her photographs are innocuous proclamations. Recurring gendered characters in state propaganda posters include female rural workers, military men, industrial workers, and male intellectuals. 109 One man’s agit-prop is another’s pop art. Cultural critic Việt Nguyễn notes that the passage of time, rather than an “artist’s mediating hand” (as in the case of Chinese Mao Pop) makes Vietnamese propaganda posters palatable—and saleable—for certain audiences. He writes, “Whatever these works signal to me as an ironic Western consumer of revolutionary chic, however, I also recognize that they are not pop art for my relatives, whose vivid memories of the war present them from seeing any irony in these posters.” 110 The difficult past which these posters conjure isn’t quite so traumatic anymore. Today, there is a market for revolutionary chic among both art collectors and tourists: several tourist shops in Sài Gòn hawk original painted posters and reproductions, geared mainly to expats. Framed on a wall or emblazoned on a tee-shirt, these images become commodified as aesthetic objects, a far cry from their communist aims. Their revolutionary fervor recontextualized, these posters carry varying meanings for different audiences. The dividing line between prop and pop may be blurry. As Nguyễn observes, popular culture is intended for the masses, whether for socialist cadres or for Saigonese schoolgirls. Current propaganda—particularly state-funded “propatainment” (a mix of propaganda and entertainment) films—is no longer concerned about war and 94 imperialism. Its focus is on the pleasures and perils of modernity. Propaganda becomes entertainment. This surely must be a sign of progress. In terms of economic and cultural “progress,” is Việt Nam finally catching up by modelling itself in the image of first world powers and their past-times? I maintain that Việt Nam’s upwardly-mobile subjects, as well as its cosplayers, are not blindly mimicking existing conventions. Referring to postcolonial subjects, cultural theorist Homi Bhabha notes, mimicry involves a difference that is “almost the same, but not quite.” The rapid spread of dominant consumer culture globally has some critics concerned about neo-imperial formations: the privileging of certain cultures and discourses over others, and the epistemic violence and elisions which it entails. But cultural imports must adapt, morph to fit their local constituent’s needs and desires. Sometimes that desire is for another “Other” to consume, and provide a contrast to the dominant culture. Anthropologist Ashley Curruthers has written about the commodification of the Vietnamese “exotic” in Japan including phở restaurants and quaint souvenirs such as lacquerware or mother of pearl knickknacks which symbolize Việt Nam’s rural/ “traditional” charms in contrast to Japan’s ersatz, uber-urban modernity. This commodification and consumption of Vietnamese otherness in Japan is void of Vietnamese bodies, only products by proxy. For a while it was the rage for Japanese brides to wear áo dài as one of their outfit changes. In a similar manner, in Saigonese cosplay it is Vietnamese bodies that fill in/ fill out the Japanese-inspired costumes and characters. Not that there are lack of either nationals in both countries. To 95 overgeneralize, in Japan, there are many skilled and manual Vietnamese laborers, in Việt Nam there are many Japanese businessmen, tech workers, and tourists. Behind the surface of the manga and anime inspired costumes, behind the veneer of fantasy and role-playing lies real inequities between Japanese and Vietnamese youth: Japan is a modernized superpower, Việt Nam is its economic shadow. I once overheard an American tourist comment that Sài Gòn’s hustle and bustle and emerging skyline is “quaint” compared to Tokyo’s disorienting megalopolis. Chung comments on the socioeconomic disparities between the two countries, revealed by the quality of costumes and money spent on them: “I’m deeply moved by looking at innocent, somewhat geeky, homemade costumes on these young [Vietnamese] people in contrast to slick, perfectly made costumes on Japanese teenagers I’ve encountered around Takashita-dori in Harajuku or Shibuya area.” 111 Cosplay costumes in Japan are often meticulously handmade by the wearers, or fabricated by a hired artist, every detail exact. In Việt Nam the costumes are cobbled together by the wearers, to varying degrees of success. In the “mirroring” of Japanese consumption of Vietnamese exotica, and Vietnamese consumption of Japanese imaginary identities, a circuit of glances and gestures occurs. Perhaps for the Japanese, it is a backward glance at an imaginary idyllic state, for the Vietnamese it is a longing gesture for utopic prosperity. Both societies have been affected by historical trauma and the push for rapid development, spellbound by the dreams of magnificent miles. Shadow and light. 112 The teenage Vietnamese cosplayers project their desires and aspirations through performance and play within the confines of a socialist regime. 96 For cosplayers endless roleplaying fantasies shield the harsh realities of labor and time. Cosplayers are space and time travelers who cross cultures with ease. The past, present, and future collide without consequence. Geographer David Harvey observes that postmodernity collapses time and space as well as cultural difference. 113 Cosplayers are the embodiment of Harvey’s postmodern condition. The geographic, socio-economic, and psychic gaps between Japan and Việt Nam are blurred in cosplay. Performers identify with an imaginary postmodern Asia. Alternate identities are reproduced. In the realm of cosplay class and ethnic inequities are erased, historical traumas forgotten. A postmodern pan-Asia is a virtual playground. In mundane life, however, work displaces play. The dream of instant time and space travel is marred by the reality of compressed time and space—a byproduct of deterritorialized labor, laborers, and markets. Migrant workers toil in unfamiliar locales for extended periods. For example, platoons of Vietnamese construction and factory workers sign three-year contracts for jobs in other parts of Asia such as Korea and Taiwan. Underpaid and overworked, these laborers join by the thousands because the pay is better than at home. For brief moments, the grim inequities at home are forgotten through the spectacle of cosplay. In cosplay, identities are the source of spectacular pleasure not painful inequality. Nevertheless, cosplay in Việt Nam is not the same as cosplay in Japan—different affective communities, and dissimilar social, economic, and historical trajectories inform the participants’ experiences. Given that both Japan and Việt Nam are more or less monoracial societies (policies on ethnic minorities notwithstanding), the importation of difference serves as a mirror of sorts. 114 Through the looking glass, a topsy turvy world. 97 Almost the same, but not quite. In consuming imported identities and products, both Japanese and Vietnamese consumers edge the contours of their national identities—they transgress and reinscribe those borders. The boundaries of individual and national identities can be confusing. Vietnamese cosplayers are young and uncertain in a society in flux, a society barraged with so many cultural influences, from Hollywood movies, hallyu (also known as the Korean Wave), Japanese anime, Cantopop, as well as the legacies of colonial and neo-colonial dominance (Chinese, French, American, etc…). Bhabha states, “the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (85-92). This slippage, excess, and difference make the performance of identities (in the case of the cosplayers) and class (in the case of Việt Nam’s emergent middle classes) worthwhile for its participants and observers. Propaganda becomes reappropriated; cosplay becomes a way to be visible and invisible; the proletariat becomes the new middle class. Cosplayers and Việt Nam’s sprouting middle classes are “becomings.” To grasp these shifting processes is to go beyond frameworks of mirroring and mimicry. Vietnamese at work and play are forging identities beyond ready-made models. 115 Old identifications aren’t necessarily displaced by new ones—they are in juxtaposition, in dialogue. The proletariat-cum-bourgoeis Vietnamese subject is not an ideologically fixed being but a becoming. Their sense of being is “multiple and always-in-process” (Vint 288). The heart of Cosplay’s appeal is fluidity—youth don a mixture of personalities. In a similar manner, Vietnamese consumers can try on assorted identities through their choice 98 of brand-name clothing and accessories. But it isn’t simply about desiring products and swapping characters. A becoming challenges stable positions. Việt Nam’s incomplete mimicry is an act of defiance— a becoming nation’s refusal to follow in the shadow its modernized forbears and investors, such as the United States or Japan. Both individuals and nations can be becomings. Science fiction theorist Sherryl Vint observes that “Both society and the individual are in a constant state of tension between those desires amplified by the social order and those muffled by it” (289). For the individual and her society, the tension between what is and is not acceptable can be potentially productive. This tension is the site of slippage, excess, and difference. Việt Nam’s ongoing ambivalence about what it desires as a developing country ensures that its identity is “always-in-process.” What government leaders demonize as a “social evil” one moment—such as Western pop music—is embraced at another moment. No longer disgraceful, consumer pleasures are a national obsession. Now the quest for social cache trumps socialist catch phrases. In striving towards modernization, Việt Nam’s “slippage, excess, and difference” from other developed countries is telling. Chung’s Play series points to these gaps: the fissures between the past and present, artifice and art, propaganda and pop. In parceling together existing cultural idioms, a hybrid language emerges. Chung’s—and Việt Nam’s—budding lexicon is built on work, play, and ambivalence. 99 Gender/Wars At work and at play, Vietnamese women bear the brunt of society’s ambivalence about its brisk cultural changes. The following segment focuses on gender, the role of the state, and the negotiations of female workers as well as artists—exemplified by Chung and Llouquet—within different economic and aesthetic spheres. First, I examine the role of women in pre- and post- đổi mới Việt Nam and highlight shifting discourses on femininity in socialist ideology, particularly within the emergent neoliberal economic state. Secondly, I address gender politics in various art worlds, within and without Việt Nam. I conclude by examining the critical reception to—and artistic strategies of— highly visible diasporic artists Đỉnh Q. Lê, Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba, An-My Lê, and Liza Nguyễn in tandem with Llouquet and Chung to reveal the ways discourses on trauma, identity, and gender is construed for each of these artists. Historian Estar Ungar notes that Vietnamese women were “de-gendered” in military socialism (starting 1954 in the North and 1975 in the South) and “re-gendered” in market socialism (1986 to today). During the war years, women filled typically male- dominated leadership, production, and education roles, due in part to socialist policies that stressed gender equality as well as the exodus of men to the war-front. Subsequently, the state has refocused on traditional, Confucian-based gender roles during peacetime as men returned to the workforce. However, this rhetoric is rife with tensions and contradictions within a liberalized marketplace. The re-emphasis on femininity takes on different classed valences in agrarian and urban areas. Rural women are encouraged to embrace domestic and farming duties, while men may seek more profitable industrial 100 jobs in the cities. For their educated urban female counterparts, new bourgeois identities attest to a wider range of occupational and consumer choices. 116 Cultural critic Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương points out that the global market demands—and exploits—differentiated gendered and raced labor. This feminized workforce consisting of marginalized third-world others are relegated time-consuming and monotonous tasks, such as low-paying factory garment and electronics work. Thus “traditional” feminine traits are translated to “worker attributes of docility, dexterity, and tolerance for tedious work on the global assembly-line.” 117 Asian female workers bear the burdens of a de-territorialized global economic system constantly questing for high yields and low overhead. In public policy as well as cultural representations (film, literature, visual art) the Vietnamese female body and psyche become contested sites of ideological tensions. Vietnamese women are exemplars of the nation (Huệ-Tâm Hồ Tài). Vietnamese womanhood is mythologized in eras past and present as long-suffering and/or tragically heroic. For example, the national pantheon includes the Trung sisters, 1 st century anti- Chinese resistance fighters who killed themselves after defeat. Việt Nam’s most famous work of literature, Tale of Kiều, is an18 th century epic poem about a beautiful, talented and educated woman named Kiều who sells herself to save her father and brother from prison. Women are often objects, not subjects. Postcolonial critic Panivong Norindr notes that the legacy of French colonial conceptions of Indochina—particularly Việt Nam—as an “exotic and erotic” entity still lingers. 118 Trauma and desire. Mainstream cultural productions featuring American involvement in Việt Nam such as The Quiet American 101 (2002), Apocalypse Now (1979), Miss Saigon (1989), Heaven and Earth (1993), and so on allegorize Việt Nam as a female protagonist in need of salvation or as an unyielding, mysterious, feminized landscape to be dominated. 119 In Việt Nam, highly successful “commercial” films such as Long-legged Girls (Những Cô Gái Chân Dài) and the box office record-breaking Bar Girls (Gái Nhảy), among others films, signal a new genre: productions dealing with sex, drugs, high fashion, homosexuality, prostitution, AIDS, among other topics previously unaddressed in public discourse. 120 These Hollywood- inspired, government sanctioned “propatainment” films are a mix of propaganda and entertainment, which mix sensational story lines with subtle moral messages. These titillating films are a radical break from earlier commercially disastrous government- funded propaganda films. In these local and diasporic films such as A Scent of Green Papaya (1993), women are still objects of a masculine gaze. Women embody the tensions between tradition and modernity. Within the Vietnamese art world, female artists have had to take a back seat to their male peers for a variety of reasons. To be a Vietnamese woman artist is to be in a “triple bind,” according to postcolonial theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha. 121 Vietnamese are already marginalized within international art circuits; a female artist’s subject position further isolates her in Việt Nam and abroad. It is difficult to negotiate a hierarchal global art scene thrice alienated as a woman, an artist, and Vietnamese, or any combination of the three: artist of color, woman of color, woman artist. These artists also operate within Vietnamese patriarchal society where masculine conceptions of success and art dominate. In order to situate the lack of Vietnamese women artists’ visibility within the 102 contemporary art world, first let me quickly give a background of Vietnamese modern art. Victor Tardieu is credited for opening the first official art school of Indochina, L’École des Beaux-Arts D’Indochine (EBAI) in 1925 in Hà Nội, which sought to teach Vietnamese locals “modern” fine arts techniques. This art education was entirely European. “Traditional” Vietnamese art consisted—among other forms—of folk art woodcuts, calligraphy, ornate embroidery, silk painting, and abstracted painterly techniques inherited through centuries of Chinese domination. 122 At EBAI, later renamed Hà Nội College of Art, new oil painting techniques following European masters emphasized the illusionistic depiction of space and figures. Illusionistic rendering expressed modernity, rather than abstraction. Western academic techniques displaced Vietnamese traditional arts and handicrafts. This approach is still taught in arts universities today throughout Việt Nam. A large number of nationally prominent artists graduated from EBAI. The distinction between “high art” and “craft” became a gendered and geographic divide: predominantly male artists 123 were enrolled and indoctrinated in modern painting techniques at the EBAI in the north whereas schools emphasizing craft emerged in the south, including the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs. After communist independence, both the north and south followed government dictates to produce propaganda which merged European techniques and Chinese socialist-realism. Socialist egalitarian policies allowed women greater opportunities to produce and exhibit artwork during this period. The then-newly formed 103 Artists’ Association provided studios, exhibition venues, and prizes; half of its members were women. 124 From the 1950s to the 1980s, artistic and cultural production was fueled by artist- workers, which blurred the previous held distinctions between high and low culture, artisan and fine artist, men and women, intelligentsia and worker. 125 All art is for the nation. Currently, all cultural output including film, art exhibitions, and music is still censored by the government and must go through a screening committee to judge whether it fits government standards and national ideology. The “re-gendering” shift from a domestic local market where the state was the primary patron of the arts to a foreign market geared towards private collectors and an international audience has been both a boon and burden for male and female artists. The paintings of peaceful landscapes and women in áo dài that dominate commercial galleries in Sài Gòn and Hà Nội are mainly executed by men. The “first generation” of these artists whose palatable, creamy concoctions evoke early through mid-twentieth century Western painting movements have each made millions on the art market. They continue their careers producing derivations of vibrant, poetic images that made them successful: empty streets, sensuous ingénues. Vietnamese women artists are often doubly excluded. Socialist Realism and lacquer paintings encouraged by the French (also of foliage, fauna, and females) remain the dominant genres featured in the national museums and officially recognized by the state. The work by women artists recognized by the state are seen as staid by their more “boundary-pushing” male colleagues now more versed in conceptual, performance and 104 video art. Male Vietnamese artists have had the luxury of focusing on their work, experimenting with styles and media, and establishing networks in cafés as their spouses take care of domestic duties. Despite being assimilated into the world of the Artists’ Association during the 1950s-80s, female artists—during both the military and market socialist eras—largely have had to worry about making a living and tending their children, and often are not part of larger social networks. The combination of Confucian ethics, a patriarchal society, and masculine national art discourse compel many Vietnamese female artists to choose between artistic careers or family. The more “critical” work sought by certain international collectors (as opposed to the “safe” depictions of idyllic scenes and innocents) is often the domain of male artists who have the time and resources to experiment with form and content. 126 Of course there are exceptions to the rule. Female Vietnamese artists such as Ly Hoàng Ly, Đinh Y Nhi, Đinh Thi Tham Poong, among others, have had limited commercial and critical success in Việt Nam and abroad. What about Vietnamese female diasporic artists residing in Việt Nam such as Sandrine Llouquet and Tiffany Chung? While they may still be encumbered by a “triple bind,” I argue that their positions as Việt Kiều grants them greater flexibility to navigate gendered hierarchies, and by extension, greater visibility within and without Việt Nam. Llouquet and Chung also belong in a higher socio-economic strata than many of their female and male peers. This fact also grants them greater freedom to produce and exhibit work. In the following section, I briefly discuss the politics of art world ranking systems, touch upon the work and framing of internationally recognized diasporic artists Đỉnh Q. 105 Lê and Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba alongside An-My Lê and Liza Nguyễn to serve as a foil to Llouquet’s and Chung’s artistic strategies. Tale of (Việt) Kiều Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba and Đỉnh Q. Lê are the most visible and successful artists in Viet Nam, 127 —both have shown extensively internationally and are synonymous with Vietnamese contemporary art. They both received MFAs in the United States and subsequently resettled in Sài Gòn. A 2009 Art in Asia magazine “Top 100 Asian Artists” feature ranks Nguyễn-Hatsushiba as #31 and Lê as #82 on the survey, which rates artists by the frequency and “quality” of international exhibitions they have participated in the past five years. 128 Naim Jun Paik, Yoko Ono, Mona Hatourn, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Shirin Nishat claim the top five spots. International representation and reputation are key factors. It is telling that Nguyễn-Hatsushiba and Lê are the only “Vietnamese” artists on this list. 129 It is also telling that a majority of the top one hundred Asian artists are men (approximately sixty-five percent). The rankings of institutional attention are based on three factors: 1. the artist’s long-term relationship with galleries and museums, 2. short- term exhibitions (type and frequency of exhibitions), and 3. location of exhibition (spaces in New York and Paris are given the highest scores out of 499 cities). The recognized ranking system follows economic scientist Georg Franck’s theories on “attention economy.” Franck posits that attention (fame) in culture is tied to economy and follows a capitalist structure (based on property, loans, and interest). 130 According to Franck, the curator (and also the gallerist and museum director) acts as a financial investor, lending their property (exhibition venue and their reputation/ fame) to 106 an artist. From this exchange, the investor (gallery owner/ curator/ museum director) expects a return on their investment: more (cultural) attention (e.g., increased reputation, fame…). The relationship between gallerist and artist is analogous to that of investor and entrepreneur: “The investor puts his money into companies from which he expects to gain rewards.” 131 Art markets are also based on speculation and hype; these investments may not always yield a profitable return. The “attention economy” is a form of indirect currency. The main investment is the development of cultural capital, as I’ve discussed earlier with the circuit of gallerists, critics, and art institutions promoting the emergence of “Southeast Asian” art. To this list of “investors” I would add art professionals such as art historians, journalists, cultural critics, collectors who are part of the aesthetic economy. 132 For Đỉnh Q. Lê, born near the Cambodian border in Ha-Tien, cultural capital has translated to economic capital for both the artist and his international “investors” including Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, Chancery Lane Gallery in Hong Kong, and PPOW Gallery in New York. 133 Lê has gained prominence for large photo-weavings which splice Hollywood Việt Nam War films with vernacular images of the Vietnamese, forming a complex response to the representations of the war. There’s a waiting list for the individually hand-crafted works which currently sell for approximately $50,000 US each. 134 In the past several years, Lê has expanded his practice to include video projects. His latest project is a synchronized three-channel video installation, The Farmers and the Helicopters (2007) which is a collaboration with two artist-filmmakers, Hà Thúc Phu 107 Nam and Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn. The multi-faceted and complexly layered narrative that drives this filmic experience is composed of an intricate weave of archival footages of helicopters during the war as well as those derived from iconic Hollywood representations such as from Apocalypse Now and Born on the Fourth of July, oral histories of farmers and other Vietnamese interviewed by the filmmakers themselves and evocative landscape images animated with dragonflies. The farmers’ interest in promoting the peaceful use of helicopters is complicated by the deeply-rooted negative associations in the lingering memories of the war. Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba, an artist of Vietnamese and Japanese descent, produces work dealing with memory, trauma, and representation. 135 His well-known lush underwater video projections serve as a memorial to the legacies of the Việt Nam War as well as Việt Nam’s current state. In Happy New Year - Memorial Project Vietnam II (2003), Nguyễn-Hatsushiba depicts dragon dancers from Tet–Vietnamese New Year doing acrobatic motions underwater. For Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam, Towards the Complex-For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards (2001), the artist hired deep sea divers to portray cyclo drivers–a ubiquitous presence on the streets of Việt Nam—to comment on the pace of progress of the country. 136 Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba’s latest ongoing project entitled Breathing is Free:12,756.3 consists of the artist running the diameter of the globe (12,756.3 kilometers) in different international cities over time. Described as a “virtual earth drawing . . . illustrating the movements of populations” the artist intends the piece to be a refugee memorial project. 137 According to the artist, the “running struggle” evokes the 108 plight of refugees in limbo, fleeing from one location to another, running from their homeland to unfamiliar terrain. 138 In each city, the artist carefully plots his run using a GPS watch. The resulting itineraries of his runs are “drawings” that are visible from an aerial perspective— organic forms or shapes that comment on that given location. The project consists of large prints (large tinted Google map prints with thin lines tracing the artist’s run) and documentary-style video footage of past runs in various locations: Hong Kong, Chicago, Singapore, Manchester, and so on. To date, the artist has run approximately1,000 kilometers. While ideally the artist would like to run at areas where there have been movement of refugees (Cambodia, Rwanda, etc..), the artist’s various project sites unwittingly also maps the art world. The artist continues his project at invited venues; hence the locations of the runs belie the institutional and fiscal support necessary to support such a costly project. Lê and Nguyễn-Hatsushiba have built solid careers on the legacies of historical trauma, particularly the Việt Nam War. 139 Part of their visibility on the international art circuit is due in part to the legibility of discourses on trauma (including the Việt Nam War) readily accessible to their international audiences. In other words, trauma becomes aestheticized, commodified. In a world of serious collectors and “serious” art, there’s nothing more deadly serious than war and its vestiges, to echo Việt Nguyễn. 140 Although Lê claims agency for the“other side”—the nameless suffering Vietnamese in Hollywood spectacles—his work only addresses his first-ưorld (Western/ized) neoliberal audience including collectors, cultural institutions, and critics. In short, the work isn’t made for Vietnamese locals although he claims to represent them. Nguyễn-Hatsushiba’s projects 109 have been conceived as “memorial” projects. The logic of the memorial is one of collective, public—not individual, private—commemoration; public state discourse is masculinist, often univocal. 141 Nguyễn-Hatsushiba’s “memorials” would fit well as examples of trauma theorist James E. Young’s concept of counter-monuments. Counter- monuments and counter-memorials emphasize impermanence and multiplicity, questioning whether the memorial and monument could provide stable, singular, eternal stances on memory. The “struggles” addressed in Nguyễn-Hatsushiba work (either underwater or on land) are representative of nation-states or blocs of populaces—public affairs of public concern. For both artists, public, political narratives override private, individual ones. Their work concerns the public sphere—expressions of collective grief, redresses of invisibility. 142 Although notions of public/ private is blurred in Asia, feminist scholars such as Nancy Fraser highlight the hierarchal gendered rhetoric of a “masculine” public and “feminine” private/ domestic spheres. 143 Yes, the personal is political but the memories Lê and Nguyễn-Hatsushiba grapple with are “masculine” ones—the afterlife of violence and aggression. Both artists serve act as translators—perhaps cultural or political— for international audiences. Describing his artistic agenda, Lê states, “I want to give us [Vietnamese] a voice, I am tired of being invisible . . .” 144 Both artists deconstruct representations of Việt Nam as a lost war and modernizing country in limbo. Both aim to give voice to the mute and marginalized, to commemorate still-present pasts. Discourse, speech or logos, and translation is suspect, imperfect, multivalent—a patriarchal endeavor. Logos also represents “the father”—chief, capital, goods (Derrida). 145 The 110 logic of logos circles back on itself: the voice that Lê reclaims becomes aesthetic goods. The voices that echo only adds to the cacophony in the hallowed exhibition and auction halls where cultural capital and economic capital merge. Lê’s and Nguyễn-Hatsushiba’s memorializing interventions, voices translating memories in different registers, still supplicate—not supplant—the (Western) father. Charlie’s Angels (of History) I don’t mean to be essentialist or draw simple gendered and geographic binaries. These categories are reinforced from without, delineated by the politics of identity and buyer’s markets. Other diasporic Vietnamese female artists have dealt with the legacies of war, most visably Vietnamese American An-My Lê and Vietnamese French Liza Nguyễn. Gender appears unexpectedly, however, in over-determined ways in both An- My Lê’s and Liza Nguyễn’s oeuvre. Based on the East Coast, photographer An-My Lê documents in her black and white Small Wars series Việt Nam War re-enactors in Virginia —history fanatics, veterans, and young men role-playing their fathers’ war. She also appears as a subject within the frame variably playing a translator, or the “enemy” Charlie: a VC female guerilla soldier. 146 She plays both sides. It’s uncanny, this doubling of representation. She is caught in between history and memory, the shutter click of the camera. The artist mentions she was urged by the re-enactors to participate in order to provide a missing component: a real, not imagined Vietnamese Other in this mock-war, “her ethnicity presumably adding an element of authenticity to the make-believe.” 147 Thus her ambivalent subject position is highlighted, simultaneously owner and object of the gaze. 111 Derrida notes the slippages of translation; Lê ‘s role falters as a translator, as a photographic subject, and as the photographer. In the photographic frame, Lê is a mutely unstable subject: a diasporic subject who escaped communism, her posturing as a threatening Việt Cong soldier evokes again the mythos of Việt Nam as a threatening feminine entity. She plays both sides. She is caught in between. Vietnamese. Diasporic. American. She is caught in a triple bind. As a “becoming,” Lê is presented simultaneously as a guerilla, an artist, and the embodiment of Việt Nam. She is outside of language, logos in these silent images. Figure 14: An-My Lê, Rescue,1999-2002, from the Small Wars series black and white photograph, dimensions variable 112 Figure 15: An-My Lê, Resupply Operations, 2003-4, from the Small Wars series black and white photograph, dimensions variable Even though Liza Nguyễn appears no where in her work, she is everywhere in it. 148 The young photographer, who splits her time between Paris and Düsseldorf, is an archivist of sorts. In Nguyễn’s formally stunning Surface series, stark white backgrounds frame clinical shots of differently hued round mounds of dirt, culled from infamous sites of American and French military aggression in Việt Nam, including Mỹ Lai. 149 She documents what remains: soil (Surface series); military relics (Postcard series); her late father’s possessions (My Father, an artist book). These disparate projects serve as personal monuments to loss and memory. Nguyễn, Lê and Nguyễn-Hatsushiba’s output exemplify the counter-monument impulse—multivocal, multivalent, polysemic. As Young points out, (counter-) monuments are also telling of their creators’ preoccupations. Đỉnh Q. Lê’s work may seek redress; Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba’s videos deal with the weight of trauma; An-My Lê’s images point at the gaps between fact and fantasy; and Liza Nguyễn’s photographs straddles absence and presence. In the international art 113 world, all four artists are tethered to a traumatized topography as well as their minority identities—and celebrated for it. It is easy packaging. Only Nguyễn’s My Father series has a trace of overtly personal narrative—a daughter’s coming to terms with a lost life, a lost history through the depiction of her father’s intimate, mundane objects (false teeth, an old hair comb, Wrangler jeans), edifices, and friends’ written recollections with their accompanying portraits. Ghostly matters. Object lessons of small objects. 150 These haunted objects are uncanny, familiar in their banality: they serve as memory’s living doubles for a dead father. 151 The figure of the father is estranged from language. He is mute figure, marked by void and silence. The second-hand stories 152 form fragments of a life, points to the failure of language and representation, not reclamation of it. In this project, the Derridean father, logos, is—literally and metaphorically—absent. The public realm is seen as “masculine” whereas the private sphere—and personal matters—is coded as “feminine.” Đỉnh Q. Lê and Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba do not foreground their life narratives in their work. When their work is presented, however, their biographies are highlighted by institutions. Đỉnh Q. Lê and Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba stake their claims on the battlefield of public memory. In contrast, Liza Nguyễn’s private grief is evoked by signifiers of a domestic life. Minh-ha’s “triple bind” could also apply to Vietnamese male artists as well. In the Western public imaginary, their masculine identity is as overwrought as Vietnamese female subjectivity. In various ways, all four diasporic artists bear—and question—the burden of representation of a people, a country, a war, a wound, a mistake. 114 Saigonistas Sandrine Llouquet’s and Tiffany Chung’s work do not aim to be memorials, counter-monuments, nor do they wish to be representative voices. Llouquet’s recent work Milk deals with motherhood. The address of her work is intimate; she does not deal with the plight of entire populations. Chung deals with the violence of the cartographic gaze and the excesses of modernization and popular culture, yet she does not make overarching proclamations. As female artists living in Việt Nam, are Llouquet and Chung affected by the same constraints as their local peers? The shift to market socialism have left artists without government support, to compete among themselves for shows and collectors. Despite overall increased national economic prosperity and higher standards of living, Taylor notes that women have had to endure social setbacks: “The rise in prostitution, domestic violence, and inequalities in the workplace made the late 1980s a considerably less prosperous time for women than men, which extends to women artists as well.” 153 Fast-forwarding to 2011, the inequity Taylor mentions still pervades. The “regendering” of the country has reinforced patriarchal values and inequities. Llouquet and Chung are somewhat immune from the predicaments that their local female counterparts face. They do not necessarily have to choose between career and family, as other Vietnamese female artists have chosen not to marry in order to make art, or have had to prioritize their families and husband’s careers over theirs. As noted, Llouquet is part of a husband-wife creative team (with little child); they share domestic duties, uncommon in Vietnamese households. Perhaps it is not mere coincidence that Chung isn’t married. 115 Llouquet’s and Chung’s status as Việt Kiều forms a buffer zone for gender, generational, and class divides. The same rules don’t apply for these Saigonistas. Their cultural capital and class position puts them in an elite position within Vietnamese society. In the conclusion of this chapter I will discuss in greater detail some of the perceived and real differences between local and diasporic artists. Sandrine Llouquet and Tiffany Chung are both emerging artists with exhibitions in significant international venues, predominantly in Asia. Their work has not reached the level of visibility and given the same critical attention that Đỉnh Q. Lê, Jun Nguyễn- Hatsushiba, and An-My Lê have been afforded. Perhaps this is because their work doesn’t overtly address historical trauma, as the aforementioned artists do. In other words, it’s more difficult to categorize Llouquet’s and Chung’s practice. The “Vietnamese” artist doesn’t make work about Việt Nam. Their oeuvre doesn’t highlight Việt Nam’s metonymic relationship to war. The Vietnamese female artist doesn’t make explicit work about either category. There isn’t a built-in audience, well-rehearsed in representational politics on the legacies of war, or the constraints of freedom. There’s no easy and “authentic” political pop critique for foreign audiences to consume. While referencing Vietnamese pop culture, Chung’s work speaks of a pan-Asian sensibility. Llouquet’s work evokes her position as a cosmopolitan subject: at home everywhere and nowhere. Llouquet’s and Chung’s cosmopolitanism still allows them to transcend geographic strictures, social moirés. Because of their greater facility with language, greater fiscal resources to produce work, and extended international networks, diasporic 116 artists such as Llouquet, Chung, Lê, and Nguyễn-Hatsushiba emerge as standouts from the sea of local artists. Occasionally, “diasporic” artists are excluded over “local” artists by foreign curators and institutions, but this is the exception to the rule. Often they are lumped under one category—“Vietnamese artist.” Chung’s numerous international residencies attest to her ease with dealing with cultural institutions and negotiating difference. An American passport also allows for ease of travel whereas Vietnamese nationals have to go through more hurdles—permits to travel, invitation letters—when traveling overseas. Ly Hoàng Ly, a prominent Vietnamese conceptual artist and poet, is able to create work and travel internationally because her husband is willing to share domestic chores on a daily basis and take care of their young child when she travels. Her case is a rare exception. Occasionally Ly brings her child along on her residencies abroad. 154 Perhaps generational differences overshadow gender differences. Female artists in the forties and above may feel more bound by gender hierarchies than younger cohorts. Although gender divides exist, younger artists appear to have more ease of movement and choices to create work, as long as they have the resources to support their practice. They feel less torn by the pull between tradition and modernity; after all, they are modern subjects. Llouquet’s contacts abroad, as well as her “foreign” contacts at “home” in Sài Gòn have given her exhibition and organizational opportunities not afforded to many “local” artists, male or female. In October 2008, the French consulate teamed up with wonderful district (of which Llouquet is half of), Sàn Art, Galerie Quynh, and the Fine Arts Museum to present le mois de l’image — a series of exhibitions and performances 117 highlighting the work of over twenty Vietnamese and French artists, DJs and VJs. 155 Llouquet used her ties with the French embassy and her art world contacts in Việt Nam to facilitate these exchanges to ensure its success. Local Vietnamese women have also forged successful art venues, including Himiko of Himiko Visual Café and Mai of the now defunct Mai’s Gallery, but their activities are generally limited to the local sphere. As touched upon earlier, diasporic artists take advantage of the cheap labor available in Việt Nam to create their work. In a way, they have outsourced their production. Chung makes full use of a feminized Vietnamese work force: many of her sculptural pieces are painstakingly hand-crafted by hired help. For instance, thousands of pink pom-poms were glued to the surface of a giant bullhorn. Llouquett’s work relies often relies on local craftspeople to construct (e.g., the Plexiglas playground, the reddish- pink giant ooze in Milk, and so on). Lê has utilized local sculptors (Lotusland), embroiderers (Texture of Memory), and so on to create works for different projects. Nameless laborers don’t make Nguyễn-Hatsushiba’s work, they often are the work. In his underwater videos, manual laborers such as cyclo drivers pantomime their earthbound duties. The work is more a reflection on progress and modernization than a critique of global/local circuits of gendered, classed labor. In certain instances, the artist must engage in “tedious work” her- or himself. Chung’s Maps also requires extensive, monotonous work (thousands of tiny circles!), rendered by the artist. Similarly, Đỉnh Q. Lê’s photo-weavings are meticulously fabricated using a traditional grass-matt weaving technique learned from his aunt. Although the artist has considering hiring help, the complex montages require the artist to 118 create each piece alone, a monotonous and physically laborious task. 156 Blurring the line between high and low, Lê appropriates a traditionally female mass-produced “handicraft” to create individual works of “high art” which feature collages of common photos and mainstream films. Llouquet’s most commercially successful works are her drawings and paintings. These artists are merely rarefied versions of laborers on the global assembly line: both artist and worker churn out product through time-consuming and monotonous tasks. In military socialism, artist and worker are one, but this is the era of differentiated gendered labor. The “traditionally feminine” attributes of “docility, dexterity, and tolerance for tedious work” applies to both the feminized third-world labor force as well as the artists. In the global art market, are “Vietnamese” artists feminized and fetishized for a certain kind of labor-intensive work? The higher demand for works which feature the artist’s physical touch and labor may illustrate this point. Yet the parallels do not sustain: the low-wage laborers’ physical work is replaceable; they are expendable, anonymous. In contrast, the artist’s physical and mental labor is placed at a premium; their names become marketed, recognized global brands. Following cultural theorist Walter Benjamin insights more than half a century later, the art world still places high value on “originality,” aura, and (ethnic?) authenticity. 157 The artist’s labor—whether manual or intellectual—becomes a prized commodity. Bourdieu notes a marker of class is the connoisseurship of creative originality and innovation. 158 The artist and her output (and their aura) becomes a synonymous object, a “unique” product—painstakingly produced, packaged, and ultimately endlessly reproduced in this age of media and migration. 119 Conclusion Depending on whom I asked in private conversations with local artists and organizers about the status of Việt Kiều artists in the community, answers varied—some expressed resentment; some stated that they made clearly “better” and more well- informed work than local artists; some said there were obvious gaps in terms of income, education, mobility, and visibility. Others said that different political and cultural rules apply—non-local artists have more leeway. Most answered that there was no difference (citing collaborative efforts), perhaps in deference to the fact that I am a Việt Kiều artist myself. Divides still exist. A part yet apart. An artist’s legibility, visibility, and marketability hinge in part on language and access, in addition to talent. Many local artists recognize that by learning English and overcoming language barriers, there will be greater opportunities. Grants, residency, and exhibition opportunities are often available only in English, increasingly the global lingua franca. Artists who do not have some grasp of English are disadvantaged when accessing information about grants. They also are deprived of vital conceptual information about international art movements and theory. On the other hand, diasporic artists residing in Việt Nam may be overlooked because they are not authentically “Vietnamese.” International collectors and curators often conflate local and diasporic categories, to the chagrin of some local artists. As discussed, Việt Kiều artists Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba and Đỉnh Q. Lê are among the most visible and successful artists in Việt Nam. 159 Some in the local art communty were dismayed that Nguyễn-Hatsushiba—and not a “local” artist—was selected by the 120 government as the official representative of Việt Nam at the 2005 Venice Biennale. This situation speaks to the politics of representation on various levels. What counts as “Vietnamese art”? What were artistic standards and criteria in selecting a representative? There are many things at stake. In the course of this chapter I have examined Tiffany Chung’s and Sandrine Llouquet’s artistic concerns as well as the art markets in which they operate. I have argued for complex considerations of local/ diasporic binaries and identifications, troubling simple categorizations while recognizing the usefulness of such distinctions. Local/ diasporic divides point to continuing historical, cultural and socioeconomic cleavages. The circuits of commerce and critical consumption is highlighted, including the creative and critical tensions between individual wants, and the desires of the market and nation-state. Both local and diasporic Vietnamese artists desire success and visibility within international art circles. Their output, however, is constrained by the Vietnamese government’s contradictory desires to encourage and curb economic growth and creative expression. The desire by collectors, auction houses, and gallerists to commodify complex Vietnamese subjectivities and identifications into marketable entities is fueled by the ongoing quest for the next hot market/ trend. Finally, curators’ and critics’ desire to fully understand and contextualize these movements is limited by our conceptions of what is avant-garde. Artists in Việt Nam are influenced by their conceptions of what is modern, experimental, critical, international, and so on. The desire of many contemporary 121 experimental Vietnamese local and diasporic artists to gain recognition on the international art market and attain both symbolic and real capital can be a conundrum for all parties involved. Nonetheless, art communities in Việt Nam are thriving despite the lack of governmental support and infrastructure—education, exhibition venues, grants, and art criticism. Artists such as Sandrine Llouquet, Tiffany Chung, among many others, continue to blur and shift boundaries. As increased international and regional interactions within and without Việt Nam continue, new identities are forming, “becoming.” What constitutes a diaspora? Who is local? There’s no place like home. 122 Chapter Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belnak Press, 2002. Biehl, João and Peter Locke. “Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming.” Current Anthropology Vol. 51, No. 3 (June 2010): 317-351. Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Butler, Judith. 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Taylor, Nora A. “Why Have There Been No Great Vietnamese Artists?” Michigan Quarterly Review Vol. XLIV, no. 1, Issue title: Viet Nam: Beyond the Frame (Part Two). University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: Michagan Quarterly Review. Taylor, Nora A. “Whose Art Are We Studying? Writing Vietnamese Art History From Colonialism to the Present,” from Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’ Connor. Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2000. Taylor, Philip. Fragments of the Present: Searching for Modernity in Vietnam's South. Honolulu: University of Hawaii 2001. Võ, Linda Trính. “Vietnamese Americans: Diasporas and Dimensions,” Amerasia Journal special issue, Vol. 29. No. 1. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2003. 124 Vint, Sherryl. “Becoming Other: Animals, Kinship, and Butler's ‘Clay's Ark’.” Science Fiction Studies Vol. 32, No. 2 (Jul. 2005): 281-300. Greencastle, Indiana: DePauw University, 2005. Yang, Alice. Why Asia? Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art, Jonathan Hay and Mimi Young, eds. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Yúdice, George. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. 125 Chapter Two What Remains: Returns, Representation, and Traumatic Memory in S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Refugee remains (plural noun): 1. the part which is left after the rages of e.g. time, weather or destruction 2. the part which is left over 3. a dead human body —Webster’s Dictionary The opening scene of Spencer Nakasako’s Refugee features Mike Siv and three of his friends (they are all Cambodian Americans in their early twenties) zigzagging on a small wooden vessel, gliding in milky brown river water. The camera pans from closeups of the three friends, who are excited and bewildered, to the gaggle of vendors on the river—women and men hawking fruit and other goods on an unnamed waterway in Cambodia. For all three travelers, it is their first time back “home”; Mike’s voiceover states: My name is Mike Siv. I am 24 years old. At about the age of three my mom and I escaped to America. I don’t remember anything about the war, about how me and her escaped, about my dad and brother staying behind. As far back as I can remember . . . I only remember coming out of an airplane and being in America. I just wanted to know what it’s like to be a son and what it’s like to have a father. Mike’s story of departure mirrors my own. In the summer of 2006, I returned to Việt Nam after desperately fleeing with my mother as a four-year-old more than two decades ago after the fall of Sài Gòn. My earliest childhood memory is also of an airplane and landing in America: I received a yellow nylon jacket to keep me warm. Whereas Mike’s departure from his country of origin is one of familial separation, my departure was one of reuniting with my late father in the States who had escaped earlier, also by boat. My 126 narrative, among thousands of individual private refugee memories, have been largely elided in North American public memory. Yet images of starved, desperate Việt Namese boat refugees (among other huddled masses) have become clichéd, ingrained in popular consciousness. Similarly, other traumatic events in Southeast Asia, such as the Khmer Rouge genocide, are invoked through certain tropes, simultaneously invisible and spectacular. Third-world Others (Cambodians, Vietnamese) are mute, marginalized and rendered as suffering spectacles within mass media depictions of American military involvement in Southeast Asia. Asian Studies scholar and historian David P. Chandler notes that Indochina (both the region and the wars that took place there) is represented centripetally, as places and events that happen to Americans; the war becomes ‘America’s longest’; it is inconceivable that the Vietnamese—or the Cambodians— should be allowed into the center of their own nationals stages, competent to make their own decisions and their own . . . history, and the perception is that Americans are something that are happening to them, rather than the inverse. 160 This chapter will first discuss frameworks on trauma and mass media. Secondly I provide a brief historical background in which to situate the films. I then analyze in detail two feature-length documentaries about return, confrontation, and repetition— S-21:The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) and Refugee (2004). I also examine the silences, void, and repeated gestures that are pivotal in these works. Finally I discuss the politics of trauma representation and scholarship. The two documentaries feature Cambodian and Cambodian American subjects whose subjectivity is centered squarely within the frame, at once displacing and reifying standard Western mainstream representations. 127 Challenging the framing of loss as a productive space, I argue that filmmaker Rithy Pahn and the subjects of S-21 and Refugee are fraught melancholics. In contrast, the mainly neoliberal, first world audiences for these two films are exempt. I assert that these films ambivalently perform both a testimonial and pedagogical role, yet the silence in the works affords contemplation and comprehension as well as confusion and misapprehension. I do not valorize these works for rendering visible the invisible, nor do I critique the films for reemphasizing traumatic visibility. I point out that these narratives, rife with contradictions, offer alternate viewpoints—part of a multiplicity of vantage points. I chose these filmic texts to look at because they are among the most visible Cambodian diasporic documentaries to deal with return, traumatic memory, and confrontation—the main themes in this chapter. Cultural theorist Marita Sturken notes that memory is “a process of engaging the past rather than a means to call it up” (259). In what ways do the two films invoke personal and collective memories to engage the past and present? In the course of this essay I examine loss, melancholia, the ethics of witnessing, and the politics of representation. Cambodian diasporic filmmaker Rithy Panh’s S-21:The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine revisits the site of the infamous Tuol Sleng prison with two remaining survivors out of the 17,000 that were executed in this former schoolhouse. These survivors also confront the former prison guards. This filmic text functions as a form of testimony, a form of memory (or memorialization), as well as a resinscription—an intervention into 128 dominant Western hegemonic historical narratives. Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, editors of Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community, note, “If testimony about traumatic experience always has a double function, both producing social discourse and initiating recovery, these two effects do not necessarily coincide . . . Testimony records a movement from individual experience to the collective archive, from personal trauma to public memory.” 161 Panh and Nakasako’s documentaries rescript agency for the formerly dispossessed. The victims in S-21 and the immigrants in Refugee are all survivors. These testimonies of survival mark the space of return as a symbolic, liminal space, a cinematic and real space in which private losses become public discourse. Testimony’s“double function” of social discourse and of starting recovery, of finding and showing, reveals gaps between individual wounds and collective memorialization. Recovery implies both uncovering what was hidden as well as healing. To reiterate, communal dialogue and private healing often do not “coincide,” as Miller and Tougaw observe. There are inherent fissures within personal and collective memory, and between political and popular rhetoric. There is always something left unsaid, unseen, incidentally forgotten or purposefully erased. This silence departs from the intended function of testimony. Testimony is about narrative, explication, elaboration whereas silence is its antithesis and its refusal. The films fulfill testimony’s “double function.” The “initiation of recovery” cursorily satisfies this audience as well as the filmmakers and their subjects. The (Western) neoliberal audience discovers “truths” about traumatic Cambodian pasts as the filmmakers grapple with it. The films’ role as testimonies—as explicative pedagogical 129 narratives—is marked by deep silences and ambivalence. By returning to what remains again and again, the filmmaker and his/ her audience attempts to return to comprehension, to logos, but is confronted by void. The testimonial function confronts the subjects within the film, but also its viewers as well. “Ethical” spectactorship and trauma studies scholarship is complicit in maintaining structural inequities which cause these traumas in the first place. Again and again we, the neoliberal audience, witness the traumas of war and displacement on small and large screens. Our empathetic and varyingly critical viewing practices, however, still help maintain the racial, class, and gender hierarchies we gape at. We watch in horror, in sadness, in disbelief. Above all, we watch in silence. The films attempt to break silences, point at fissures. In these films, it is the very silences, the voids that allow for alternatives beyond stereotypical, easily consumable traumatized narratives. The silences in these films mark what remains—unexplainable, unfathomable, untranslatable. By “remains,” I refer to real and spectral bodies, alive and dead, and in between. Remains are also the traces of what is left behind, resuscitated in collective and individual memory and history. The protagonists of these documentaries, both “victims” and perpetrators, are haunted. 162 130 Trauma Dramas Collective trauma and cultural trauma are related, yet separate concepts. A sense of collective trauma precedes cultural trauma. Sociologist Jeffrey Alexander argues that events aren’t “inherently” traumatic—trauma is a “socially mediated” phenomenon. 163 Individual ordeals become a collective issue if it affects a significant number of people. People can be directly or indirectly touched by the event. Trauma is socially mediated through film, political discourse, and popular culture. Through public discourse, a collective’s sense of injury congeals as cultural trauma. Alexander notes that cultural trauma occurs “when members of a collectivity feel that they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.” 164 Wounds form future scars. Some cultural scars fade while others remain. What society constructs, remembers, and represents as a wounding event depends on many shifting political, cultural, and even economic variables. Sociologist Neil J. Smelser defines cultural trauma as “a memory accepted and given public credence by a relevant membership group and evoking an event or situation which is a) laden with negative affect, b) represented as indelible, and c) regarded as threatening a society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions” (44). 165 After being disfigured, society must reconfigure itself. Part of this reconfiguration is representing the harm inflicted upon the body politic. Smelser observes that “collective coping” is an “ingredient of cultural traumas. Representations, in order to be collective, 131 must be understood and shared” (78). Film is an agent which affirms collective pain and constructs cultural trauma. These “trauma dramas” 166 are mass media narratives such as film, television, and newspapers that cast particular perspectives on a tragic event, and contribute to the way the trauma is subsequently narrated and constructed. Memory and forgetting are complementary processes linked to mass media. Mass media’s production of traumatic narratives creates a shared sense of cultural trauma. To use Elaine Scarry’s work on pain, the world is “unmade,” undone through instances of individual or collective trauma. Horrific instances shatter an individual or group’s world, and sense of the world, beyond comprehension. The world is eventually “remade” after the traumatic fact, through articulation, language and art—through culture (Scarry xiv). Cultural trauma is manufactured and contested by different collectives. The individual stories in S-21 and Refugee are case studies of cultural trauma. The protagonists’ lives are shattered, undone. We witness them pick up the mirror splinters and see them and their fragmented world reflected. It is an act of comprehension, an act of remaking worlds. An individual’s pain becomes writ large. It becomes legible to their society at large. These films transform individual agony into a form of collective witnessing—a recognition of cultural trauma. Although the youth of Refugee didn’t experience genocide first-hand, they grapple with its after-effects through second-hand narratives and the first-hand shocks of familial separation, U.S. assimilation, and homeland return. The survivors of S-21 share their grief because they want justice. Through trauma the world is unmade; through filmic testimony the world is remade. 132 Culture-specific traumas are made over again by other collectives as object lessons, as cautionary tales—consider the overdetermined connotations of Hiroshima and the Holocaust. The world of Cambodian atrocity is made anew for a sympathetic audience, horrified by human rights violations, or touched by tales of separation and loss. This retelling and “remaking” of a particular world—and a particular space and time within the world—is also a translation between worlds. It’s an act of translation between developing and developed worlds. As far as the “developed” world is concerned, the sites of horror in this small developing nation didn’t exist, was unmade from the start. To put it another way, Khmer horrors exist at a safe remove—the pornography of genocide doesn’t really matter politically, unless you were directly affected. The Cambodian genocide became hypervisible for the first world only after it was translated into digestible snippets by early German documentary crews, international news coverage, and feature films such as The Killing Fields (1984). Today, Cambodia still exists in the world imagination through the topogoraphy of trauma and temples. These films translate Cambodian local and diasporic traumatized narratives for differing audiences. They serve as an important resource for diasporic Cambodians who are coming to terms with the genocide, particularly younger generations who doubt the genocide even happened. A key audience for Refugee are college-educated Asian Americans, a largely neoliberal demographic. A main target for S-21 is the international community, Western policy-makers, and to a lesser extent, local Cambodians (although the film is in English). One of S-21’s goals was to bring about a Khmer Rouge tribunal. As pointed out before, these films gratify the need of largely neoliberal audiences to 133 understand the world through a certain lens. I address audience and reception in greater detail in the remainder of the essay. The painful scenes these films conjure both builds up and breaks down barriers between first and third worlds. The undoing of the world through pain, torture and trauma, as Scarry points out, is marked by silence, inarticulateness. The remaking or the reconstitution of one’s world is signaled by articulation and perhaps action. Other than doling out awards, however, the first world audiences of these films largely remain silent—there is lack of critical commentary about the issues the films present. There is lack of action following up the consciousness-raising spectatorial exercise. Empathy and apathy can go hand in hand. Both S-21 and Refugee are not mainstream films: they are independent documentaries that get screened at international festivals and academic conferences. The audiences at these events are often urbane, if not urban, middle class, educated white collar workers. The limited distribution of these films may hinder them from significantly impacting Western cultural memory. Cultural memories are the communal recollections, both triumphant and tragic, of a society. Similar to cultural trauma, these memories are a collection of individual stories or singular events that become a larger part of public discourse. Unlike cultural trauma, not all collective memories are painful. Building upon Freud’s concept of the “screen memory” in which benign memories displace difficult ones, Sturken notes that “cultural memory is produced through representation—in contemporary culture, often through photographic images, cinema, and television. These mnemonic aids are also screens, actively blocking out other memories that are more difficult to represent.” 167 Panh’s and Nakasako’s work displace Hollywood screen 134 memories of Southeast Asian trauma and US involvement memorialized in films such as The Killing Fields and Apocalypse Now. An alternative cultural memory is created. Yet the screen still exists, no matter how seemingly transparent: neither work indicts United States foreign policy which had an impact on creating political instability in the region. In the films, there is no mention of Nixon’s “secret bombings” which led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and eventual exodus of refugees. Instead, both films focus on a providing a subtle spectacle of suffering and healing, if not reconciliation, of survivors of the Pol Pot regime. Through the filmic lens, Individual agony is translated into collective memories of cultural trauma. The two films fulfill their intended functions of representing specific wounds which were previously unseen or acknowledged. In this process, Khmer and Khmer American traumas become a small part of international cultural memory. In the space between screen and spectator, many worlds are unmade and remade. The screens showing S-21 and Refugee reveals worlds of pain worlds apart, but do not fully reveal its intimate causes and conditions. 135 Time After Time: A Brief Historical Tracing Cambodia’s traumatic past is overdetermined. In Western consciousness it is a country synonymous with genocide—psychic images of bloodshed and terror. Cambodia is thousands of black and white photographs of the dead, civilians staring ahead blankly past the shutter-click into their uncertain future which is now the undeniable past. There is much scholarship on the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia’s troubled past and present, and the connections in between. Partly for these reasons, I will only sketch a brief outline of events and factors which inform the documentaries I discuss in this chapter. Not all histories are the same. Post-colonial cultural theorist Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out that the construction of historical narratives “involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means for such production” (6). 168 Hegemonic history and social memory reflects power and the lack of power. The testimonials to Cambodia’s past and present lay different claims, depending on who is telling the story—some discourses are privileged while others are erased. Historian Craig Etcheson muses, “One can go on and on about all of the factors antecedent to Cambodia’s tragic modern history and all the factors incidental to its unfolding—the legacy of Angkor, Norodom Sihanouk, the Việt Nam War, the Cold War, regional rivalries, superpower games and so forth . . .” Yes, one can go on and on and miss the point, or miss connecting the points. Etcheson advocates for an interwoven perspective. Cambodia’s ancient and contemporary histories are interrelated stories of regional territorial struggles, from the growth of the Angkorian empire to French colonial 136 protection of a vanishing kingdom and today’s border skirmishes with Thailand. Khmer history looks vastly different from the perspective of the Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Americans. There are always blind spots. The twentieth-century conflicts in Southeast Asia are often categorized by Wetern historians into three Indochinese wars. The first Indochina War (1946-154) was of French decolonization in Cambodia, Laos and Việt Nam, which ended with the Geneva Conference. The Second Indochina War (1954-1975, also known as the Việt Nam War or the American War, as it is referred to by the Vietnamese) was of Vietnamese unification and U.S. attempts to stop the the “domino effect” of Communism; this war also involved Laos and Cambodia. The Third Indochina War (1975-1991) was over who would govern Cambodia, and how—this strife provoked regional and international attention (Etcheson 3-5). 169 Etcheson continues, “Thus what historians characterize as distinct wars with distinct protagonists appeared to many Cambodians to be simply one long war, with one central protagonist—the Khmer Rouge—driving the entire conflict.” 170 A saying captures Cambodian sentiment about their horrific past:“We are all conspirators, we are all victims” (Duffy 91). 171 By this logic, the United States, losers of the Second Indochina War or the Việt Nam War, are also conspirators. Caught in the long shadow of the Việt Nam War, the general American populace does not know about the depth of U.S. involvement in Cambodia. In the story of contemporary Cambodian civil strife, Western historians such as Etcheson often downplay United States’ complicity. U.S. involvement in Cambodia and Laos was 137 directly tied to U.S. military presence in Việt Nam (Young). The North Vietnamese transported supplies via the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. The Vietnamese referred to it as the Trường Sơn trail, after the neighboring mountains, which bordered Cambodia and Laos. In a controversial 1997 article published in the Los Angeles Times, journalist Robert Sheer notes that in 1969, Nixon and Kissenger launched “Operation Breakfast” in Cambodia, a fourteen-month assault of carpet bombing which led to the overthrow of anti-imperialist Prince Sinhanouk and the installment of Lon Nol. Sheer states that Lon Nol was a “U.S. puppet who could not hold power. The legacy of U.S. policy, including the 600,000 dead and many more maimed, created the conditions for the Khmer Rouge’s seizure of power in 1975.” 172 During Nixon’s “secret war” in Cambodia and Laos from 1969 to 1973, 2.7 million tons of bombs exploded in Cambodia (Owen and Kiernan). According to historian Marilyn Young, the 150,000 tons of bombs dropped in Laos from 1964-1969 was meant to wipe out civilization in the Plain of Jars (235). Intended to quickly end military engagement in the area, Nixon’s failed four year carpet-bombing campaign was a disaster for all involved. The U.S. bombings paved the way for anti-U.S., anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist sentiment nurtured by the Khmer Rouge, also known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea [CPK]. 173 David Chandler explains that the air attacks, which “destroyed a good deal of the fabric of Cambodian pre-war society,” verified the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s claim that the U.S. was the main enemy, as well as encouraged thousands to join their anti-American struggle. After the bombings, thousands flocked to U.S.- financed Phnom Penh. 138 On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge, a Maoist-inspired group of rebels headed by the French-educated leader Pol Pot, took hold of Phnom Penh, which was then evacuated. Declaring year zero, they aimed to get rid of the existing hierarchical power system, and was intent on “reconstructing society from ground zero.” 174 They fostered “class warfare between the ‘base people’ who had been bombed [by the U.S.] and the ‘new people’ who had taken refuge from the bombing, and thus had taken sides, in CPK thinking, with the United States.” 175 The “base people” were often peasants, whereas the “new people” were often educated urban professionals or white collar workers. During their repressive four-year regime known as Democratic Kampuchea in which dissidents, ethnic minorities, and religious followers were killed, it is estimated that 1.7 million Cambodians—a quarter of the population—died of torture, illness, starvation, or mass executions. Ultimately even those who were sympathetic with the Khmer Rouge were sent to torture camps within the environment of political paranoia. Under the banner of an agrarian, communist revolution, production and consumption was collectivized. Under the same utopian fervor, urban areas were evacuated, religious worship banned, and education eradicated. Courts, money, and markets halted. Freedom of expression, travel, and speech was limited. Furthermore, the family structure was subsumed under Ângkar, the Party Organization—children often turned in their parents. 176 In December 1978, North Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, driving the Khmer Rouge into the jungle, putting Hun Sen into power. The Vietnamese left in 1989; civil war persisted for another nine years. 177 Sheer writes, 139 Instead of applauding the Vietnamese for ending the genocide, the Carter administration followed the lead of the Chinese Communists, who continued to back their protege, Pol Pot. For the next 13 years, the U.S. and China insisted that Pol Pot, who killed 2 million Cambodians, had the right to name Cambodia's legitimate representative at the U.N. . . . The U.S. only broke with the Khmer Rouge when Pol Pot refused to participate in the 1993 election, which created the coalition government that is now falling apart. Sheer notes that the Hun Sen goverment discovered the infamous “killing fields” instigated by Pol Pot. However, Pol Pot was being protected and financed by China and the U.S. for his role as leader of an anti-Hu Sen coalition in Thailand. Sheer indicts the U.S. government for its meddling into Cambodian political life; he makes a connection between U.S. foreign policy in Indochina and the past and current political violence in Cambodia. 178 Providing more background to the current political climate, American journalist Karen J. Coates states that in 1993 the United Nations administered democratic elections with Prince Norodom’s Funcipec Party receiving 45% of the votes. However, she notes, “Hun Sen refused defeat. He and his cronies intimidated the nation and threatened to secede several Cambodian provinces. In the end, he was given a power-sharing post with his rival. Ranadriddh was installed as first Prime Minister, Hun Sen as second prime minister.” 179 Coates’ text is informative and well-intentioned but the general tone of her 2005 memoir about Cambodia entitled Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War is overwrought. Her perspective on Cambodian politics simultaneously evokes pity and horror for this little nation that should, could do better. Since the formation of the 140 coalition government in June 2004, Funcinpec is no longer seen as an independent political party. Hun Sen, now Cambodia’s prime minister, has what appears to be substantial control over the political system and security, with no real opponents. 180 Additionally, corruption within the government apparatus appears to be rampant, according to a report issued by a U.S. Agency for International Development. 181 This brief history will hopefully contextualize the discussion of S-21 as well as Refugee in the following segments. 141 More Human Than Human: Rithy Panh’s S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine Diasporic filmmaker Rithy Panh (b. 1964) was born in Phnom Penh and survived the Khmer Rouge regime, although his parents, sister, and other family members did not. He escaped Cambodia at the age of fifteen to the Thai border, eventually settling in France. In 1985, he started studying at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (France’s national cinema school). 182 After Panh first settled in France, he rejected all ties to his homeland. He noted, When I was living as an exile in France, there was a long period when I refused to speak my native language . . . I had been uprooted and I felt somehow incomplete, torn between forgetting and remembering, between past and present, always ill at ease . . . And when you’ve survived genocide, you always feel guilty about being a survivor. 183 He realized that he must confront his traumatic past. Panh has subsequently produced several features and documentaries mainly about life in Cambodia and genocide, which have garnered numerous prestigious international awards. Although he tried to erase his past, he came to the conclusion that “we can’t build our future by forgetting. The survivors must tell their stories and ensure that the memory of what happened is handed down from the past to the present. We owe a debt to the dead and we have an obligation to our children.” 184 Panh sees the importance of linking the past and the future, not seeing them as discrete unrelated events. In S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine a few survivors confront the guards who worked at the prison centers more than twenty-five years ago. S-21 is the code name for Tuol Svay Prey High School (all schools were closed) in Phnom Penh that was converted into a center for torture and 142 imprisonment. According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), S-21 stands for “Santebal, the Khmer word meaning ‘state security organization’ and ‘21’ for the walky-talky number of former prison chief Nath (Keo 1). In Khmer, Tuol Sleng means hill of the sleng tree; the sleng tree bears poisonous fruit (Chandler). Mass killings were in the countryside “off site” after victims were tortured and interrogated. All of those who entered S-21 were marked for death. Of the 17,000 prisoners admitted to S-21, only seven reportedly survived. 185 The number of seven survivors has been widely accepted and mythologized by Western media over the past thirty years as indicative of the brutality of the regime. According to Phnom Penh-based DC-Cam researcher Dacy Keo, the original estimate of seven comes from one of the first documentaries about the Khmer Rouge, entitled Die Angkar (The Angkor). Produced in 1981 by Studio H&S of the former East Germany, photographs of seven S-21 survivors are shown. Keo states, “there is some speculation that 7 survivors were shown to parallel the 7th day of January, the ‘day of victory’ in which Vietnamese forces overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime” (2). DC-Cam, however, claims that one hundred seventy-nine prisoners—of which one hundred were soldiers— were released from 1975-1978. A total of twenty three survived after the Khmer Rouge regime was toppled. As of December 2010, there are five survivors alive. 186 The prisoners were tortured in order to extract “confessions” about their bourgeois lives and their activities against Ângkor. After their confessions were meticulously detailed, the detainees were killed. It was a deadly ironic situation: to prolong their lives, the prisoners refused to confess, which only extended and exacerbated 143 the level of their torture. In 1980, S-21 became the Museum of Genocidal Crimes. 187 In Sài Gòn, the former Museum of American War Crimes—now renamed the War Remnants Museum to be more palatable for Americans—served a similar political function of evoking horror, pity, and outrage at past atrocities, as well as support for the current regime. 188 The fact that these two museums echo each other is not coincidental. The Vietnamese government also created Tuol Sleng with the aid of Eastern Germany. Vietnamese photojournalists—following Vietnamese soldiers “liberating” Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge—discovered the torture site on January 8, 1979 by following the stench of decay emanating from the grounds. The Vietnamese government closed and cleaned up the site with Cambodian colleagues, going through its ample archives. The man responsible for the former Museum of American War Crimes in Sài Gòn, Mai Lam, also created the Museum of Genocidal Crimes in Phnom Penh. Mai Lam was a Vietnamese colonel fluent in Khmer with experience in legal studies and museology (Chandler). Trauma studies scholar Lisa Moore notes that the museum was created with the aim of appealing to the international community for aid and also to recognize the new Vietnamese-backed government, People’s Democratic Kampuchea. The museum, as “objectively” as it appears to present these crimes, is a propaganda tool. In forming a genocidal museum, Lam hoped to craft a narrative that served the PDK and the Vietnamese government’s agenda, as well as address the future needs of Cambodians (Chandler). As an historian who paid attention to details and connections, 144 Lam told interviewers in 1994, “In order to understand the crimes of Pol Pot-Ieng Sary, first you should understand Cambodians, both the people and the country.” The biased history he constructed in the S-21 displays, according to historian David Chandler, “denied the leaders of the CPK any socialist credentials and encouraged viewers to make connections between the DK regime and Tuol Sleng on the one hand, and Nazi Germany and what Serge Thion has called the ‘sinister charisma’ of Auschwitz on the other.” The analogies between Auschwitz and Tuol Sleng, among other sites of trauma, are overdetermined today. Both sites draw legions of trauma tourists. The visitor to either site is at once compelled and repelled by the specter of what remains and the spectacle of remains. Within this narrative, the communist Vietnamese government is portrayed on the international stage as heroes who successfully stopped unfathomable evil. Tuol Sleng was a secret operation, only known by very few. Now it is infamous the world over. Chandler notes that Pol Pot disavowed any knowledge about Tuol Sleng during a 1997 interview, “hinting that the museum and its archive were Vietnamese concoctions.” Pol Pot stated to journalist Nate Thayer, “I made only big decisions on big issues. I want to tell you—Tuol Sleng was a Vietnamese exhibition. A journalist wrote that. People talk about Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng, Tuol Sleng.... When I first heard about Tuol Sleng it was on the Voice of America. I listened twice.” 189 Tellingly, when the museum first opened, Cambodians were denied access; only foreigners were allowed. A 1980 document from the PRK Ministry of Culture, Information, and Propaganda states that the site aims to show “international guests the cruel torture committed by the traitors to the Khmer people.” Tuol Sleng was finally 145 opened to the public in July 1980. The first week the museum was opened to the general populace, thirty-two thousand people came. Cultural anthropologist Judy Ledgerwood wrote that survivors came “searching for meaning, for some explanation of what had happened. A visit would not have been an easy task; people who went through the museum in the first year said that the stench of the place was overwhelming.” We also witness these scenes of painful discovery in Panh’s documentary. Early in S-21, images of the mundane fill the screen, everyday life in a contemporary rural household in Cambodia: a farming family seeds rice under azure skies; their wailing infant receives a bath. One of the family members, Him Houy, a small, thin man in his forties, served as a deputy security at S-21. It is exactly the banality of his surroundings that raises the question of how genocide and mass terror can arise in the quotidian. Sitting in the small wooden house, his father urges him to “Tell the truth. Then perform a ritual asking for forgiveness to get rid of the bad karma.” The weary, remorse-stricken former guard states that “I am sick all day. I have a headache when I think about it.” In a close-up, his mother Yeay Cheu states bluntly, “They indoctrinated him, they turned my son into a thug that killed people.” Featured in a medium-shot three- quarter profile with his mother sitting in the background, the son dejectedly stares off into the distance. He responds calmly, “If we killed people of our own free will then that’s evil. But I was given orders. They terrorized me with their guns. That’s not evil. The leaders who gave the orders are evil. Deep down, I was afraid of evil. I was afraid to die.” Later on in the documentary, the other former guards and staff—all similarly quite ordinary and unassuming—also claim that they were also terrorized by fear and 146 intimidation. Their statements echo other perpetrators of other crimes in other infamous contexts who claim that they were “only following orders,” evading any agency and moral culpability. Echoing anthropologist Alexander Laban Hinton, How does genocide come to take place? 190 The film asks its subjects, “How do you survive absolute horror? How do you become a killer?” 191 We are all conspirators, we are all victims. There is a fine line between victim and perpetrator, civility and barbarism. Hinton warns that genocide, as a floating signifier, is semiotically linked within twentieth century discourse on violence to “barbarism.” “Barbaric” acts are antithetical to enlightened, rational “civilization.” Mass violence is construed as “primitive.” As an example Hinton notes how violence in Bosnia and Rwanda is represented as the “primordial clash resulting from a seething cauldron of ‘ancient tribal hatreds.” He also cautions against universalizing moral rhetoric which champions “modern” morality, embodied by “a type of ‘civil society’ governed by international law (5). 192 Much of the current literature on international human rights, and human rights violations operates on the implicit binaries between civility and barbarism, morality and inhumanity. It draws distinctions between modernity and savagery, universal and particular. According to this patronizing logic, the natives aren’t fit to govern themselves and need intervention, constant supervision or else they will revert to their uncivil/savage ways. The long, troubled case of the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal is a telling example. After five years of negotiations, the tribunal comprises a hybrid Cambodian- international court. Phnom Penh has stated that it will only allow two cases to be tried 147 out of a total of five against former Khmer Rouge cadres. So far, only Duch, who ran S- 21, has been tried and convicted on July 26, 2010. A November 2009 Time magazine articles cites an international law monitor accusing the Cambodian government of obstructing the tribunal. The New York–based monitor, Open Society Justice, claims that “political interference . . . poses a serious challenge to both the credibility of the court and its ability to meet international fair trial standards” (Shay). International news outlets and human rights organizations continue to voice their concerns over corruption and political pressure interfering with the court proceedings. Beyond legal protocol, Cambodia, Việt Nam, among other Asian countries are constantly criticized for failing to meet international human rights standards, and by extension, moral standards. For instance, Western mass media often chastize China, Việt Nam, India, and Cambodia for subhuman working conditions. What is left out is that international conglomerates are partly responsible for sweatshops and greatly benefit from this supply chain. Nike, Old Navy, Wal-Mart, among other global companies, depends on exploited labor in developing countries to maximize their profits. International corporations and intergovernmental organizations significantly impact the lives and livelihoods of the third world. Deterritorialized organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are indirectly influential in determining political and moral agendas in developing countries. 193 NGOs, in their vision and implementation of universal rights and needs, may “provide moral justification for the spread of empire.” 194 It seems innocent 148 enough—these organizations are there to help these developing countries economically, politically, and culturally. The nomadic, rhizomatic flexibility of these deterritorialized institutions (and its flexible rhetoric) is the hallmark of empire, and of late capitalism. 195 Under the rhetoric of civilizing and/ or moral missions, imperial violence is unleashed. Anthropologist Lisa Rofel notes that among the characteristics of empire, “it regulates not just territory but social life in its entirety; and thus a major mode of rule is biopower; and though bathed in blood, empire always presents itself, in the guise of the concept of a just war, as dedicated to peace.” 196 International military interventions–such as the Iraq War, Afghanistan, Việt Nam, or the Persian Gulf War—are waged in the name of transcendent peace, human rights, and modernity. Yet these “just wars” are seen as having different means and ends than military action instigated by other nation-states. Empire and “necessary” evils go hand in hand. Civility and barbarism are not polar opposites. Violence, rationality, and modernity are linked. The “justified” violence of empire and the “barbaric” violence of genocide cannot be decoupled. As theorist Michel Foucault muses on biopower, power is justified rationally through regimes of knowledge and institutions of discipline which disguises violence and coercion under the screens of modernity. 197 Empire’s rational murders are not a far remove from the lives claimed by genocide’s seemingly irrational bloodlust. Hinton stresses the “deep and complex relationship between genocide and modernity, which are bound by tropes of ‘progress,’ projects of social engineering, the reification of group difference . . .” 198 Indeed, 149 Democratic Kampuchea’s reforms were in the name of progress and social betterment. The Khmer Rouge aimed to create a just, ideal world where social inequities didn’t exist. Their utopian communist vision was a critique of the cruelties of capitalism and empire. The U.S. empire’s message hit home daily: mass killings of unsuspecting civilians. In the shadows of B-52s, bloodshed.The Khmer Rouge’s rhetoric was also one of civility and humanity. Their genocide was in the name of progress. The revolutionary leaders did not intend for such devastating losses. 199 I do not endorse the Khmer Rouge leadership’s claims, nor do I support America’s past and present foreign policies. On either side of capitalism or communism, and in between, progress is the justification for barbaric, civilizing violence. In sweatshops, torture chambers, detention centers, and fallow fields throughout first and third worlds, this violence is both mundane and murderous. The Animal in You The chasm between the quotidian and the horrific is startlingly narow. How can a human torture and kill another human? A Tuol Sleg guard replies matter-of-factly, “We saw them as animals.” This sentiment is echoed, by another guard who describes his activities: Torture was something cold and cruel. I didn’t think. I was arrogant. I had power over the enemy. I never thought of his life, I saw him as an animal. When I raised my hand, my heart never checked my brain, never stopped my hand and feet from striking. My heart and hand worked together. Torture was like that. (37:50) The victims became dehumanized, mere animals to be carelessly slaughtered. In “People are Looking at You,” philosopher Theodor Adorno notes that genocidal regimes (including the Holocaust) are made possible by the impulse to liken humans to animals. 150 They are deemed Others. Through this strategy, a population alienates their “out group.” For instance, in anti-Japanese propaganda during WWII, Japanese were drawn as bespectacled rats, snakes, and other vermin. The less victims are like “us,” the less sympathy they receive: “Indignation over cruelty diminishes in proportion as the victims are less like normal readers, the more they are swarthy, ‘dirty,’ dago-like.” Part of the function of documentaries such as S-21 is to humanize Cambodians, to put a human face, to atrocities seen as monstrous. Often the third world is seen by the first world as swarthy, dirty, dago-like. Adorno traces the curve of this dehumanizing, and ultimately murderous logic: The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally- wounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—‘after all, it’s only an animal,’—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators having again and again to reassure themselves that it is ‘only an animal,’ because they could never believe this even of animals (168). The pitiless attitude “it’s only and animal” is the dividing line between ethical and non-ethical behavior. Cruelty against animals is acceptable—they are less than human. Savagery against humans deemed animal-like becomes acceptable—they are less than fully human. Humane treatment of animals and fellow humans hinges on the thin line between us and them, the civilized and the savage. Adorno elaborates on this difference: In repressive society the concept of man is itself a parody of divine likeness. The mechanism of ‘pathic projection’ determines that those in power perceive as human only their own reflected image, instead of reflecting back the human as precisely what is different . . . 200 The self-same image is considered human. Difference doesn’t reflect diversity. The image of difference marks the non-human, the “animal.” S-21 unwittingly provides an 151 image of difference to those in power yet also reflects back the human. In this film, the Khmer Rouge killing machine finally reveals its faceless cogs and their humanity. The film challenges the victim/ perpetrator binary the same time it reinforces them. The workers at Tuol Sleng are variably featured with family members or as young adolescents following a brutal regime; they do not merely represent the face of evil, or of animal barbarity. Panh reverses the question, “Who are these animals that could commit such atrocities?” Through their interrogation, the former torturers are given a degree of human agency. The former prisoners and their torturers have chosen to be part of this filmic dialogue. They victims and the perpetrators reflect each other. “I saw him as an animal,” the torturer says. With that utterance and with that “pathic projection,” human agency and subjectivity are disavowed. It initiates a psychic and real space where violence can be wrought upon a subject construed as a non-subject, a non-entity. Vann Nath, survivor writes in his memoir, “I want to keep the memory [of the genocide] alive so foreign visitors and the new generation of Cambodians can understand what happened during that time. Our children must never learn to treat human beings like animals, or lower than animals.” 201 Disavowal, displacement, and effacement deny responsibility. “I was only following orders,” the guards individually echo each other in defense. The disavowal of human subjectivity, and of a subject’s humanity, allows for the displacement of responsibility, the displacement of emotions and ethical judgement. And the effacement of their offence. As critical theorist Akira Lippit interprets Adorno’s passage, “The 152 ethics of murder is made possible by seeing the animal first as nonhuman, then inhuman. If one’s victim can be seen as inhuman, the aggressor reasons, one is justified in performing acts of violence, even murder upon that body, since those acts fall beyond the jurisdictions of anthropocentric law.” 202 The circuitous logic and circuits of power that renders people inhuman and allows inhumane treatment is not outside the realm of rationality. This deductive reasoning effaces agency and culpability. Doing one’s job precludes moral judgement. Being a responsible worker precludes ultimate responsibility. Or does it? “I was only following orders.” The slide from taking directions to torture is steep. “I saw him as an animal.” In identifying with the killing machine, the perpetrators also become dehumanized. As they argue, they are only nuts and bolts, willingly blind to the Khmer Rouge’s machinations. In bloodlessly following commands, the guards participate in coldblooded crimes. Scared like animals, they diminish other humans to animals. Still later in the film, Vann Nath responds bitterly and succinctly to the guards, “We distinguish humans from animals. If we turn men into animals, that’s not right” (1:27:25-1:30:24). Once more, the divide between human and nonhuman is evoked. The line between civility and savagery is crossed again and again. For both victims and perpetrators, survival is an ethical dilemma. “The leaders who gave the orders are evil,” decries a peon. By this logic, obedience to authority is not evil. Deference to power is a rational act. If the leaders are evil, those in control are supra- human—they are above humans; they have transcendent power over life. If the leaders are evil, those in control are at the same time sub-human—they fall below humane behavior. What is moral? What is the nature of evil? Is it human or animal? 153 Loss in Translation: Melancholia and Memory Chum Ney cowers like a small animal. His back to the camera, the diminutive man clad in a green long-sleeved shirt and grey pants stares up at a three-story building, which takes up most of the frame. The nondescript faded yellow building with cracked plaster framed by palm trees is S-21. He starts crying. The camera zooms in slowly. “It’s hard to talk Nath! I can’t do it! We suffered so much—my children, my wife, I lost everything!” His friend, a fellow survivor, puts a comforting hand over his shoulder, says to him calmly, “Don’t think about it. We’re lucky to be alive. With the Khmer Rouge still alive, what can we do?” Chum Mey, an engineer, and the painter Vann Nath who appear together in this scene are only two of remaining three survivors located at the time of filming. Ney continues sobbing, his face in profile, “If I hadn’t been imprisoned in Tuol Sleng, I wouldn’t have lost my family. Nath, why did it happen like that?” That question continues to haunt. Each prisoner was forced to “confess” their crimes against the Party as well as produce a lengthy list of suspects—friends, neighbors, relatives. Many confessions and lists were pure fabrications, a brief respite from the blood-letting, water torture, and electrical shocks. Vann Nath, a handsome man with white hair, survived S-21 because of his skills as a painter—he was ordered to paint flattering images of Khmer Rouge leaders while imprisoned at the torture center. His subsequent paintings document the traumatic experiences he witnessed during his time there. In an introductory scene featuring Nath working on a painting, the camera shuttles between closeups of Nath and details of a 154 painting which depicts blindfolded and shackled prisoners being led to S-21 for the first time. The camera zooms in on minute areas, focuses on the paint being applied onto the canvas. The painting yet is unfinished. Vann Nath’s grief is palpable, also unresolved. The survivors and the prisoners of S-21 are both melancholics—the scene and site of trauma is ever-present. In Freud’s 1917 essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” there are two different forms of grief in response to loss. The first response is “normal” mourning, and the second type of reaction is “pathological” melancholia. 203 Both display similar symptoms: “profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, inhibition of all activity.” 204 Nonetheless, mourning is a natural, healthy process—the mourner grieves for a period of time and then recovers. The lost object is eventually replaced, substituted. Noting that grief eventually subsides, Freud states, “after a lapse of time, it will be overcome.” 205 In contrast, melancholia does not have resolution—it becomes a pathological affliction. The melancholic cannot overcome his/her grief—it is endless; the lost object/ subject cannot be substituted, replaced. In mourning, “the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” 206 The melancholic identifies with the lost object. Freud states, [T]he free libido . . . was withdrawn into the ego . . . to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object . . .Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego . . . The ego wishes to incorporate this object into itself, and the method by which it would do so, in this oral or cannibalistic stage, is by devouring itself. 207 The melancholic subject is ambivalent towards the lost object, simultaneously feeling love and hatred. The melancholic experiences nostalgia, guilt, and rage. The melancholic consumes these conflicting feelings, feeds upon himself. It is a form of self-punishment. 155 Stuck in eternal limbo, the melancholic cannot reconcile these contradictory impulses, desire and disgust, reverence and resentment. What is a melancholic to do? In Chum Mey’s inconsolable cry, “Why did it happen like that?” is the constant return to the site of loss. “If I hadn’t been imprisoned in Tuol Sleng, I wouldn’t have lost my family.” Clearly Ney ponders this question over and over again, unable to deal with the grief of his losses. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud mentions that the “compulsion to repeat” is the patient’s impulse to return again and again to a distressing situation, although s/he no longer recalls the origins of the compulsion. The “repetition compulsion” is an endless loop, a psychic return to the site of trauma. Vann Nath’s paintings of terror and torture may be seen within this framework. The film slowly pans on an untitled painting, revealing rows and rows prisoners lying on the floor, stacked head to feet; it evokes diagrams of slave ships and cramped quarters. Nath’s constant, short steady brushstrokes, the slow buildup of paint, translates trauma, revives scenes of pain. In the film, both the “victims” and “perpetrators” are subject to revisiting sites of trauma. Director Rithy Panh states that the Khmer Rouge regime survivors’ inability to mourn produces a “massive collective wound,” one which “will not heal.” 208 Reconsidering Freud’s conception of melancholia in the Loss anthology, editors David Eng and David Kazanjian propose that this melancholic position is a productive one. In this space, ethical responses and aesthetic production can highlight ambivalence and loss, as well as hope, rage, and guilt. They propose a framework which “ . . . generates a politics of mourning that might be active rather than reactive, prescient rather 156 than nostalgic, abundant rather than lacking, social rather than solipsistic, militant rather than reactionary.” 209 Loss is recast as a “creative” rather than a negative force. Within this light, Vann Nath’s paintings are a generative space. Beyond grief, the depictions of blood, bones, and brutality becomes a site of witnessing. Rithy Panh’s corpus of work may also be viewed through this lens, an attempt at healing, a site of discourse. But is mere representation enough? And what are the limits of representation, particularly representations of the horrific, of the un-representable? 157 Return Policy (Conclusion) Trauma theorist Shoshana Felman writes, “trauma never happens once.” 210 This quote intrigues me because it gestures at how wounds are experienced. Traumas are mediated, remembered. We are compelled to revisit personal and public traumas. We pick at scabs, recount scars, watch tragic epics. Trauma repeats itself, returns; trauma is a specter. If trauma never happens once, then it is by definition, a melancholic phenomenon. To restate, traumas gets replayed in the psyche over and over again. Depending on the event, it then gets restaged as part of collective memory. Or it is forgotten. Shock has many lives—its original incarnation and its afterlives. Trauma retains its potency through restagings, reenactments, retellings. The melancholic compulsion to eternally return gives trauma life, even when tinged by death. Life in a prison, as inmate or guard, is not really living. Former prison guards reenact Tuol Sleng’s day to day activities in empty spaces, empty rooms. They too have returned to acknowledge the dead. During their service in S-21, these guards were either twenty-two or twenty three or thirteen and fourteen. They were tiny cogs in the death machine, the ones who followed and implemented the Khmer Rouge’s ruthless policies. In several scenes, groups of guards recount various torture rituals. Black and white photographs leave traces of maimed bodies, gnashed visages, upturned eyes, pools of blood, the almost dead. Guards individually pantomime their duties twenty five years ago, voicing their daily routine: “I unlock lock the door, I bring them their water. You shut up! Or I will 158 kick you! I close the door, I go to the next room. . .” Prisoner’s food and water rations are kept to the minimum; due to the malnourishment, they only need to relieve themselves every few days. The dead are invoked, their absence a tangible presence. In the empty corridors and in the warren of tiny prison cells, the guards call up ghosts through the banal rituals of discipline and punishment. Twenty five years have passed since the guards have performed these routinized rituals. Their gestures still seem so effortless; their individual bodies each uniquely remember the intimate, mundane contours of the torture center. In one scene the camera remains static—a wide shot of a large empty yellow room—as two guards enter a room, check and yell at imaginary prisoners, then leave. As viewers we assume the position of the camera—distanced, unmoving (perhaps unmoved), mute—as these beings torture and are tortured by their invisible ghosts. Our field of vision is incomprehensible (what is this abandoned room?) until the protagonists, the “actors” within the documentary play out the scenes before our eyes, embodying the terror we’ve only heard and read about, or have seen splayed in black and white. Yet within these reenactments, there is a silence, a void. Of course one of the voids are the vanished victims, whose spirits are conjured through these rituals. The empty rooms symbolize the unfathomable terror and the gaps between the subjects and their audience—the gaps in history, memory, and translation. The viewer can never understand the subject’s motivations for being part of the film, and more importantly, the perpetrator’s complex reasons for joining the Khmer 159 Rouge. The documentary medium can only do so much, it can only point and say, “Look there, this happened,” like the guides at Choeung Ek, also known as the “killing fields,” who point at large empty pits in the dirt and say, “There, this once was a mass grave.” We stare at the voids, the hollow wounds. I wonder, watching the film, why did they agree to reenact these scenes of defilement? Why did the conspirators and the victims agree to walk these halls again? Perhaps because they never left, perhaps because they want to exorcize their ghosts. They too, are returning to remember, or perhaps to forget. The guard’s enactments of their duties also bears their “compulsion to repeat”—they are also witnesses to trauma. They return again and again psychically—and return physically, this time—not to absolve their crimes, but to acknowledge them. We are all conspirators, we are all victims. Figure 16: Scenes from S-21; bottom left: Vann Nath I asked Panh during an interview in Phnom Penh about his process of working on the film. Over a three year period, the director located and worked with a few former 160 staff, managing to build trust and rapport. Eventually Panh persuaded several prison guards (Nheib Ho, Som Meth,Tcheam Seur); the photographer Nhiem Ein; Prakk Kahn, an interrogator; Top Pheap, a typist and interrogator; a “doctor” named Mak Thim; among others 211 who worked at Tuol Sleng to talk candidly on film about their experiences there. They do not have equal screen time: some subjects talk at length while others remain in the background or occasionally interject. When Panh asked Khieu Ches to explain his daily activities at the prison, the former guard had difficulty expressing himself verbally. Ches found it easier to explain it through gestures: It wasn’t pre-scripted . . . The guard couldn’t describe [what he did] because the nature of the violence was beyond verbalization . . . Or perhaps he didn’t remember exactly. He had difficulty speaking it. He started gesturing. I said that he could show us instead . . . Then it came automatically, these actions he did day after day. He didn’t have to think about it, it was ingrained. It was his body’s memory, deep in his muscle. 212 Again, language fails. Only the body’s silent memory can fully recall and articulate the past, blood memories etched in marrow. In the scene that Panh refers to the camera does not remain static but follows Ches on the second floor of Tuol Sleng tending to prisoners. The viewer sees him close up, roaming the halls but the camera does not follow him as he enters the converted classrooms now used to house prisoners shackled side by side. The camera is pressed up against the bars of the classroom; again the guard is seen at a distance. It is once more a visual metaphor for the distanced, mediated vision the audience has access to. Media studies scholar Deirdre Boyle states that this scene is one of the most effective in the documentary: Ches, reinhabiting his brutal twelve-year old self, strides the line between the past (the inner rooms of Tuol Sleng) and the present 161 (where the camera is stationed, on the periphery); he as intermediary between both. Boyle also counteracts critique that the “reenactment” scenes are ineffectual because one does not know whether these scenes are scripted; one does not know the filmmaker’s intent. I agree with Boyle that these moments are key. These scenes are among the film’s most thought-provoking, poignant, and disturbing. It does not matter whether the scenes were scripted. The viewer does not need to know the director’s intent through heavy-handed voiceover explanations or edits. The stagings come off as part theater of the absurd, part flashback, part performance art. To echo Feldman, trauma never happens once. Everyday the conspirators and the victims, these living ghosts, wander the halls of Tuol Sleng. Further elaborating on these scenes and the workings of memory, Panh states: [Ches] would then say, ‘We did this and this,’ along with his gestures . . . We have many memories. We have bodily memory. For instance, we remember smells. We may forget something but then there is a trigger—two years later we remember the smell and everything linked with it. Or maybe a touch; or we may hear a song, and suddenly it all comes flooding back. 213 These traumatic memories come flooding back for the torturers and survivors, uncontainable. Panh’s representational strategies highlight ambivalence and silence even as it interrogates and confronts perpetrators. “The idea of putting victims and executioners together is very seductive, but it’s also tricky,” Panh notes. “You don’t want to be a voyeur. You kind of have to develop an ethic of the image.” 214 Clearly, Panh has an agenda but his strength as a filmmaker is in his willingness to not overtly state his point, but rather to let his subjects speak for themselves. I argue that this film functions as a form of testimony for both the conspirators and the victims—they are both bearing witness. What does it mean to bear witness, and 162 what are the stakes? Panh is also a witness, and by extension, the film’s audience. But to witness, and to bear witness are two different matters. The former may just be an act of ingesting, observing and does not necessarily require moral action. However, the latter requires agency and responsibility. To witness is to merely be a voyeur, but to bear witness requires an ethical framework. To bear witness is a social act, to simply witness is not. Testimonies and testimonials are social acts that require witnesses. Psychoanalyst Dori Laub writes, “For the testimonial process to take place, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other—in the position of one who hears.” In a sense, this other “who hears” is the dialogue initiated by Rithy Panh between inmates and captors. The other who hears is also the filmmaker and his implicit audience. The guards’ reenactments are testimonies, just as Nath’s paintings are testimonies. However, these testimonies are marked by silence. Silence belies knowledge as well as voids. These testimonies are a form of grieving, but to follow Eng and Kazanjian’s formulation about loss as a productive space—What is gained? In returning Nath can better understand his torturers and vice versa. And the audience can better understand the whole situation. But to what ends? For compassion, for healing, for justice? But that is not adequate. To claim that loss and trauma as productive, generative spaces (to use Eng, Kazanjian and Scarry’s frameworks) is to follow a teleological model of progress and growth. These frameworks hinge on the assumption that there is a “moving beyond” to the next stage, that “healing” may help instigate growth. But for melancholics, there is no 163 such thing as productive, conclusive mourning, only a perpetual grief, a continual return to the site of trauma. As postcolonial scholars have argued, notions of progress and growth are all relative. Modernity itself also is a traumatic process, a site of loss and trauma. Development and transition leaves wounds. The melancholic’s obsession with his/ her wound mirrors the (post-) modern’s obsession with development. The melancholic’s gaze is fixed on the past whereas the (post-) modern’s gaze is steadfastly locked on the future. Underlying both obsessions is fixity. Both inhabit the present but are mired in another moment in time and space—stuck. The postmodern melancholic demands an audience: the pain they have endured—due to historical trauma, due to modernity’s aftermath—is real. The postmodern melancholic is caught in an endless loop, waiting a long time for an other to witness their suffering, to hear. The others who hear these testimonies do not get what they expect. The audience does not get the standard moralizing meta-narrative, even though the film is about morality. Panh is absent in the documentary aurally and visually, to the disappointment of some critics who prefer a more guided approach with self-reflexive voice-overs and documentary hand-holding. However, the director is very much present in the subtle framing of the camera, the way the film is edited, the understated fragmented unraveling of narratives. Panh willingly does not explain the motivations for his subjects nor condemn or valorize them. He leaves room for ambivalence, confusion and circumspection. The director’s refusals and silences are part of the film’s strength. He does not state “This trauma is beyond words” for the guard’s gestures and Ney’s sobs. Panh shows that this trauma, this violence still exists despite the fact that both victims 164 and perpetrators want to forget. Panh does not heavy-handedly demand justice. The painter Nath serves as a stand-in for the filmmaker and the audience, asking tough questions about culpability and ethics. A journalist observed that Nath serves as the film’s compass, “calmly holding up a mirror to each of his ex-captor’s acts of inhumanity.” 215 Nath’s ex-captors acknowledge their inhumanity but in doing so reveal their humanity. Panh observes, “We the victims also need the words of the perpetrators to tell their side of the story.” 216 The director begs the question whether the then-teenaged torturers are themselves victims, caught up in a cruel regime. At one point, the resolutely calm Nath asks a former staff member, “If you are victims, then what are we?” This question harks back to the dividing line between humans and animals, between victims and perpetrators. The executioners were also treated like animals by their own regime, coerced and threatened with death for themselves and their families. Neoliberal audiences—film festival goers, academics, students, Westerners—are also asked the same question about accountability and victimhood: by structural inequities and invasive foreign policies, are the viewers implicated in these crimes? If you are victims, then what are we? Both victims and perpetrators take part in the testimonial process. The other “who hears” may be close intimates, former enemies, or an invisible audience. Speaking of his subjects’ involvement in the film, Panh said it radically affected them. Referring to the re-enactors, he noted, “Something came out, like a cancer.” Similar to other former staff in the film, Him Houy’s family didn’t know of his involvement in Tuol Sleng: “No one knew about what he did. He said the film changed him; [this secret] was like a wound.” 165 Both sides are wounded. Speaking about the survivors who watch this film, Panh states, “You are not human anymore. You are hungry. You’ve lost your humanity. Twenty, thirty years later you have lots of difficulty [dealing with] the experience. How can you tell others that you ate insects and grassroots to survive?” He notes that after screenings, either privately or in Q&A sessions, survivors often speak about their own experiences for the first time. The act of bearing witness and the act of witnessing can be complementary. The one who is bearing witness, carrying a moral burden, also needs a witness—one who hears and sees. Those who bear witness actively engage in action; those who witness are recipients, carriers of knowledge. The passive witnesses may one day act, spurned by what they have seen and heard. The coeval acts can lead to new insights about the limits of pain, comprehension, and action. Those who bear witness dialogue with their witnesses. Laub observes, “Testimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude. The witnesses are talking to somebody: somebody they have been waiting for a long long time.” 217 Indeed it has been a long time. The empty rooms in Panh’s film stare blankly through the decades of denial and silence following the Pol Pot regime. It has taken about thirty years for justice to attempt to intervene. As I write this in July 2010, the United Nations-sponsored Khmer Rouge tribunal is under way. The hybrid tribunal has cost over US$100 million with allegations of corruption. Human Rights Watch noted that “Credible reports of widespread corruption . . . [at the tribunal] were not sufficiently addressed.” Corruption is a fact of life in Cambodia as well as Việt Nam. Some business publications, including the World Bank 2009 Cambodia Economic Referundum, maintained that corruption in 166 Cambodia was a limiting variable for investment in the country, causing its regional rankings to be low. 218 The World Economic Forum’s 2010 report states that Cambodia’s competitiveness is being strangled by corruption, bureaucracy and lack of infrastructure. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge leader, is said to have interfered with the proceedings by the judiciary. Human Rights Watch further notes, “Ongoing political interference by the Cambodian government in the work of the Khmer Rouge tribunal . . . seriously undermined the court's integrity, independence, and credibility.” 219 In repeated national forums, Hun Sen expressed his “concern” about national stability, warning that another civil war could break out again if the tribunals continue. In essence, this is a veiled public threat to not summon more Khmer Rouge leaders for prosecution, other than the five former high-ranking officials already detained. Hun Sen believes that the past horrors could be repeated, that this trauma could reoccur. Pen Sovann, a former Khmer Rouge propaganda official who later defected, disagreed that there would be any political instability. Sovann who eventually became Prime Minister of the Hanoi-backed and short-lived People’s Republic of Kampuchea from June 27-December 5, 1981, stated in an interview on December 9, 2009 with Cambodian newspaper Khmer Machas Srok, “I think that this could not happen. It is only the personal opinion of Prime Minister Samdech Hun Sen; he wants to protect persons of the former the Khmer Rouge Regime.” There is some truth in Sovann’s statement. Today, persons associated with the Khmer Rouge and those that have been adversely affected by the regime are both invisible. Once one has scratched the surface of their ordinary lives, their ordinary jobs, does one learn of the histories so close to the surface. 167 Coincidentally, the day I interview Panh is the day the head of Tuol-Sleng Kaing Guek Eav’s (aka “Duch”) sentence is announced. He is not one of the top four former Khmer Rouge leaders; he was simply a middle level leader but the first one brought to trial. 220 This is the first significant verdict of the tribunal. Many in local and international communities expressed dismay at the sentence of nineteen years. Technically he was sentenced to thirty five years but sixteen years were subtracted for time served. In the courtroom and overcrowded public gallery, many cried in disappointment. Now sixty- seven in 2011, Duch is said to have overseen 17,000 deaths at Tuol Sleng. Unlike some other cadres, Duch expressed remorse; in November 2009, he stated in court, “I am psychologically accountable to the entire Cambodian population for the souls of those who perished . . . I am deeply remorseful and profoundly affected by destruction on such a mind-boggling scale.” However, he also maintained—like so many of his colleagues— that he was merely a “cog in a running machine” and had made a naïve choice (Shay 3). Prosecutors maintained that he was responsible for devising many of the torture techniques used to extract “confessions” from S-21’s inmates. He countered that he was also a victim: “I was completely terrified at this destruction, but I just did not know what I could do about it. The only opinion available to me was to devise a proper interrogation tactic” (Poulet). 221 The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is a gruesome display of these “proper” interrogation tactics— ghastly spectacles of rusted metal and dried blood. If you are victims, then what are we? Panh’s films have been instrumental in focusing international attention on the Cambodian genocide, and in getting the tribunal started. S-21 first premiered at the 2003 168 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Prix François Chalais. It also received best documentary honors at the European Film Awards, the Valladolid International Film Festival and the Chicago International Film Festival, among other international awards. 222 In Cambodia, Khieu Samphan (Khmer Rouge intellectual head and Pol Pot’s successor) claimed during his November 2007 pre-trial hearing that he first learned about his regime’s atrocities upon viewing Panh’s film in 2003. 223 Khieu still did not accept accountability for crimes committed. Based on the film’s overwhelming facts, he finally acknowledged that there was a scheme for the mass killings and that Tuol Sleng existed, points that he publicly denied for decades and in his memoir. 224 As Khieu Samphan’s example shows, the film bears witness, provides irrefutable evidence that this moment in history occurred, despite denials. The documentary medium can do so much; it can point and say, “Look there, this happened.” Panh said that many people in Cambodia don’t believe the genocide occurred, particularly the younger generations who have no recollections or experience of its horrors: “Some young people don’t think the genocide happened; no one tells them about it, usually none of their family members. They say, ‘There is no evidence.’ They see the film, and then say, ‘I believe.’” The film’s audience is increasingly mixed. Although the film’s audience has largely been an international one, as the Khmer Rouge tribunal gained visibility in Cambodia, so has the film, to an extent. The film’s Cambodian audience is still limited, as distribution channels are limited. This documentary will not get aired on the highly regulated television channels in Cambodia because of its political content. Despite the thousands of pirated Hollywood DVDs and politically charged documentaries such as 169 Burma VJ 225 on sale in local markets, DVD stores, and malls, S-21 wasn’t available the numerous times I looked for it. It has been screened on rare occasions such as International Human Rights Day at Bophana Audiovisual Center in Phnom Penh, a non- profit resource center co-founded by Rithy Panh. The projection room at the Bophana Center can seat about forty at maximum capacity; at most screenings there are approximately twenty people—mostly a mix of expatriates and local Khmer high school and college students. S-21’s audience is still reduced to those attending international film festivals and special screenings in urban Cambodia. Suprisingly, there was little knowledge about the tribunal and the workings of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. In January 2009, the Human Rights Center University of California at Berkeley issued a report that 85% of Cambodians had little or no knowledge of the trial. 70% of Cambodia’s 14 million people were born after the Khmer Rouge’s fall from power. The tribunal being held in Cambodia is “key in sparking interest in the trial and knowledge about the period,” observes Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. With the release of a textbook on the Khmer Rouge and classroom education on this period, Youk Chhang notes now, “the whole country is aware” (Shay 4). Over 28,000 people attended Duch’s trial at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the official name for the tribunal, and millions feverishly tracked the trial on television, radio, and newspapers in Cambodia, as I did. Through mass media, what was unknown or willfully forgotten is now unearthed, remembered. 170 For the local and diasporic Cambodian audiences as well as for international viewers, S-21 serves as a reminder that these horrific events happened, a way to not forget. As a pedagogical tool, it unspools the past that was hidden in Cambodia. For those who are already familiar with the events, it puts a contemporary face (literally) on the ones who remain; reminding the viewer that past is still present. Finally there are lessons instituted in the Khmer school system regarding this period of history. Panh continues, “Documentary is subjective; it is not fact. Many still cannot believe this happened. They cannot imagine the Khmer Rouge time.” Despite the way S-21 works as pedagogical and testimonial tools, Panh’s approach is not overly didactic. It still is clear that Panh’s agenda is a political one; he aims to preserve cultural memory and seek justice. Referring to the Duch verdict, Panh said with a tinge of sad irony, “Until today we didn’t know who is perpetrator, who is victim. We just learned officially today that Duch is a perpetrator and the commander of S-21.” 226 He refers to the fact that prior to the verdict there was no official recognition—by the Cambodian government and by other nations—that these crimes occurred. Testimony can productively acknowledge loss, grief, and mourning. When the tribunal concludes, however, does not mean conclusion or resolution for Khmer people. Chum Mey, proclaimed in an interview during Duch’s trial, “I cry every night. Every time I hear people talk about the Khmer Rouge it reminds me of my wife and children.” As we learn in the documentary, he lost his entire family during the genocide. Chum Mey can be often found at the former prison. Friends have spoken to him on 171 several occasions—“I come every day to tell the world the truth about the Tuol Sleng prison . . . so that none of these crimes are ever repeated anywhere in the world.” 227 Although Chum Mey’s aim “to tell the truth” is a “productive” impulse after devastating losses, he still is a melancholic forever grieving, continually returning psychically and physically to his site of trauma. In his act of bearing witness, he is also enacting a “compulsion to repeat.” Panh echoes Chum Mey’s sentiments in an essay he wrote entitled “Cambodia: A Wound That Will Not Heal”: “I lived with memories of my relatives, with the anxiety– the certainty–that the same tragic story would repeat itself.” 228 Perhaps Panh too—as “productively” as he has dealt with loss—is a melancholic. It is telling that his article names the wound that will not heal as Cambodia, a country, a people. The melancholic will not heal from his wounds. Both Panh and Chum Mey are concerned that these tragedies will repeat. The former is certain that “the same tragic story” will recur while the former is committed to preventing similar crimes from reoccurring “anywhere in the world.” Again the obsession with repetition, the “repetition compulsion”—the constant return, the constant grief marks the delay of mourning. Even though Panh’s earlier statements imply that a level of healing and mourning has taken place because of his subjects’ involvement in the film (as well as for the varied audiences of the film), the film itself does not attempt to depict any resolution or reconciliation. They may have “changed” according to Panh, but we don’t know whether for better or for worse. Panh’s subjects, both torturers and survivors, are presented in the 172 film as melancholics to the rest of the world. For the viewers of the film who identify with the survivors, there has been a “bonding,” (to use Laub’s terminology) or a sense of recognition. It is the film that serves as “the other who hears.” As I’ve argued, the film serves a testimonial function. These viewers/ survivors are finally able to talk about their experiences but that may not necessarily be the path to effective mourning. I assert that the only ones who are able to “mourn”—following Freud’s framing—is the international audience (but not the filmmaker) who have the luxury of safe emotional, psychological and physical distance from the subject matter. The “lost” object/ subject for these viewers, including myself, isn’t directly experienced as “real.” It is a representation that points at the lacks of representation. Perhaps mourning doesn’t even occur, but rather pity, or at best empathy. The final scene of S-21 features an old empty classroom—a blank gaze, a hollow wound, now familiar, its victims gone. Also gone are the guards whose long lonely shadows filled the hallways and whose voices echoed in the chambers. The camera is low to the ground, unmoving; an eddy of dust fills the air. Once again silence and void. Instead of choosing to conclude with a talking head making a declarative statement, or an unforgettably gruesome image, Panh poignantly leaves us with absence. As with other moments in the documentary, this absence makes its presence keenly felt, a mute witness. After returns and confrontations, only ashes remain. 173 (You Don’t Have To) Live Like a Refugee: Spencer Nakasako’s Refugee Somewhere, somehow, somebody must have Kicked you around some Who knows, maybe you were kidnapped, Tied up, taken away, and held for ransom Honey, it don’t really matter to me Baby, everybody had to fight to be free You see, you don’t have to live like a refugee No you don’t have to live like a refugee . . . —Tom Petty, Refugee (1980) Displaced by violence in their own countries, an influx of Southeast Asian refugees resettled in America in the eighties. In the Reagan era Cold-War backdrop of anti-immigrant and anti-Asian sentiment, Spencer Nakasako, who teaches film in the Ethnic Studies department at UC Berekeley, sought to work with these diverse communities. Over the past twenty years, Nakasako worked with disadvantaged Southeast Asian youth in the Bay Area to document their lives. Nakasako’s documentaries have been screened widely at national film festivals, within and without Asian American contexts.His workshops and collaborations yielded a number of documentary projects, notably among them A.K.A. Don Bonus, a Cambodian teenager’s video diary about his coming of age struggles and Kelly Loves Tiny, an Iu Mien refugee couple’s video diary about love and young adulthood in Oakland. These two documentaries were produced in conjunction with the Vietnamese Youth Development workshop, a grass-roots community video workshop which Nakasako helps run. Mike Siv, the main protagonist of Refugee, a college student and coach for an afterschool youth basketball program, proposed to Nakasako a summer video workshop, out of which the 174 documentary developed. Originally Siv was not part of Nakasako’s workshop but encouraged his basketball mentees to participate, and eventually joined. Both Nakasako and Siv edited the final documentary. 229 Many Cambodians were displaced several times: first by the U.S. bombings in which many fled to Phnom Penh, then the evacuation of Phnom Penh by CPK, and finally escape and resettlement in other countries. A large number resettled in Oakland, California; there is also a significant Cambodian community in Long Beach, California. For many the cultural and psychological adjustments were difficult at best, partly due to different conceptions of social regulation, different articulations of biopower. In Buddha is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America, anthropologist Aihwa Ong examines Cambodian communities in America—mainly Oakland and San Francisco—and the ways citizenship, race, and cultural and political structural differences affected these new immigrants. Ong writes, In their transition from Pol Pot’s utopian communism to the advanced liberalism in the United States, Cambodian refugees moved from a regime of power over death to a regime of power over life, from a state that governed from eliminating knowledge to one that promotes the self-knowing subject, from a system based on absolute control to one that governs through freedom, from a society that enforced initiative for collective survival to one that celebrates individual self-cultivation. The rhetoric of freedom, individuality, and self-knowledge is no less insidious in governing and disciplining citizen-subjects— it is more “civil” and less overtly brutal. These “radical disjunctions” in styles of population government challenged Cambodian refugees’ vision of themselves and their relation to the social world. In Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief, literary theorist Anne Cheng 175 reframes psychoanalytic discourse to acknowledge how marginal subjects are racialized and assimilated. Cheng notes these subjects identify with hegemonic power structures, but also experience hidden melancholy due to these violent processes. The refugee, the immigrant, the exile are eternal outsiders within the matrix of freedom, liberty, and citizenship. This matrix rhetorically embraces ethnic difference, but in reality occludes difference. Due to this dissonance, grieving subjects are produced. Cheng states that histories of socio-economic exclusion become real and psychic loss. 230 Hence, Cambodian refugees grapple for survival and success on the outskirts of American cities and American consciousness. It is within this context, and within the context of the urban ethnic ghetto of the Tenderloin that we are introduced to Mike Siv and his friends. In an early scene, Siv states, “Me and my homies, David and Paul, we're going to Cambodia. We'll see the sights, visit family, have some fun.” But all parties know that this will be an emotionally difficult journey. This site of return is a liminal space, an in-between state. All three have not yet returned to Cambodia. Mike fled as a young child, while David and Paul were born in the States. Their connection to Cambodia is a psychic one. Their only memories of Cambodia are mediated ones: family stories and photographs, popular songs, films— cultural artifacts. They do not have individual memories of this place; they have inherited collective memories and cultural traumas second-hand. Mike Siv’s only real memories of Cambodia are actually memories of the transition to America, the liminal space of transit, a dead zone of despair and desire. Siv 176 says, “As far back as I can remember . . . I only remember coming out of an airplane and being in America.” Trying to remember “as far back” as he could, he realizes his only connection to Cambodia is a fragile one. He also wants to make connections to another tenuous relationship, the one with his absent father. “I just wanted to know what it’s like to be a son and what it’s like to have a father.” These are both sites of lack and loss—the nonexistent relationship with one’s country of origin, the missing father. Even though this is Mike’s first physical return, he has returned to this site of loss many times before. In a scene with his father, Siv says tenderly and bitterly, “everyday, for twenty years, I thought about you, about what it’s like to have a dad.” Siv occupies the position of the melancholic several times over, caught in an endless cycle of mourning—for a lost but living father, for a living but lost country. Siv also experiences “hidden grief” (to use Cheng’s term) over living in a country where one feels displaced, lost. As Anne Cheng notes, socio-economic exclusion becomes real and psychic loss. Mike’s constant return to the site of familial trauma and lack fuels a “repetition compulsion,” marking a constant loss— everyday, I thought about you. His statement is also a testimonial. The witness has been waiting for this moment for a long, long time. He is met with decades of silence. Later on, we learn that the truth about his father’s life in Cambodia has been shrouded in silence; similarly stories about the lives lost in Cambodia have been silenced. In a way the loss of the father—in real and symbolic terms—is the loss of logos, of law in a Derridean sense. 231 Mike’s relationship with his father becomes metonymic for his relationship with his homeland—it was the very loss of law, the displacement of order, the failure of language that caused the original traumatic separation from both father and 177 fatherland. Yet as Eng and Kazanjiian point out, this melancholic loss can be a productive space. But some histories of loss cannot be overcome. What is the role of history? It is through history and historical narratives that trauma, loss can be situated, understood. Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha observes an “historical intermediacy . . . [in which] the past is discovered in the present so that the future (once again) an open question, instead of being specified by the fixity of the past . . . makes available to the marginalized or minority individuals a mode of performative agency.” In returning to Cambodia, the past and future meld; the past is discovered in the present, connections are made about what happened before, after, and in-between individual and collective traumas. The past and future become not a fixed problem but an “open question”—loss becomes not a negative space but a creative one. A few days before his journey, Mike Siv learns from his aunt in Cambodia that his father has another wife, another family. Furthermore, his brother Nang (who lives with his aunt) and his father do not know each other. “I learned more in that hour than I did my whole life,” Siv says to the camera. The scenes consist of hand-held shots that give a sense of immediacy and intimacy. In the scene in which Siv learns this news takes place in the cramped apartment he shares with his mother. The clock on the wood- paneled wall reads three a.m. Siv is in the white kitchen with linoleum tile as his mother looks on worried. Speaking about the filming technique, Nakasako mentions that it involves both “subjective” and “objective” points of views. Virtually every scene consists of two cameras and three miked locations. The first subjective camera is often of a 178 participant in the scene, which gives greater access to close-up shots and details. The second objective camera is most often manned by Nakasako and provides a larger sense of the scene, as well as allowing for subjects to interact more freely without feeling constrained. Language of Love After shots of a long flight, sight-seeing in Angkor Wat, and partying in Phnom Penh, Mike, David, and Paul meet their families. Siv is reunited with his father and brother first. Spotting them by sight, perhaps by their images he’s seen in family photos or videos, he takes a deep breath and says, “It’s my family, I know it’s them.” After a family banquet at the home of Mike’s aunt, David meets his sister for the first time. Holding him, she cannot stop crying. “Brother, I missed you so,” she wails in Khmer. Logos, language, loss. David cannot respond, he forgets his minimal knowledge of Khmer. “When she gets emotional, I forget how to speak,” he complains to Paul later. This is the failure of language. Yet it is language that allows Mike Siv a space to engage with his family and his past. His mastery of Khmer allows Siv to bridge barriers which his friends cannot, or will not. Paul refuses to see his family until the very last day of their journey. He’s afraid of dealing with the emotional toll. The audience witnesses the failure of language on multiple levels. Siv’s friends find it hard to communicate in a virtually alien tongue. There are gaps in translation and cultural gaps. For Mike, David and Paul, English is essentially their native language, and Khmer is a foreign language they struggle with. As second-generation refugees, 179 occupying a liminal position between countries and cultures, this lack of facility with Khmer further contributes to their sense of alienation from their homeland and loved ones. Another failure of language is the Derridean one in which even mastery cannot overcome language’s inherent lack. In this case, there is always a void, a gap. Meaning is not fixed, language is ultimately an insufficient means of communication. David’s sister is struggling to survive in Cambodia. David says off screen, “I knew they weren’t well off but I didn’t know it was like this—they live beneath someone’s house, they don’t even have walls.” His mother has given him a thousand dollars to give to his sister to build a new house. Although Mike, David, and Paul are impoverished by American standards, they are struck by the level of subsistence in rural Cambodia. Poverty and dirt. Living in Phnom Penh, I have also been caught off guard by the luxury and poverty that festers side by side, like the soot staining the once pristinely white geometric ‘seventies modernist buildings—utopic dreams—crumbling throughout the garden city. Mike Siv’s brother Nang stays with him in a hotel. Paul is manning the camera, walking in on the room as they both wake up from an afternoon nap. The wide panning shot shows Sivand Nang on two twin beds in the white-tiled room. The television’s white noise drones in the background. Sivasks his brother about what he thinks about staying with him. In a framed closeup, Nang grins widely and scans the room, “It’s a nice room and has everything you need— a fan, a refrigerator, a television.” Closeup shot of the white ceiling fan swaying, quick cut to the television screen which features a young 180 woman singing. A medium shot shows the two brothers sitting on the edge of their beds speaking. “At home there’s none of these things . . . It feels comfortable sleeping in the same room as my older brother. It feels like a dream . . . It’s more like I don’t want us to be apart again.” The fan whirs, there is silence. This scene illustrates the tremendous distance between them. This understated scene makes my heart sink because of what is not expressed. The hotel is not a home; it is a temporary shelter, an in-between space. They both know they will be separated again, that this sense of home and ease is fleeting. Perhaps it is the material comfort of this space—apart from the relative poverty they both experience in Cambodia and the United States—that affords them this moment. Briefly, they are at home in the world. It is impossible to sustain. The sense of comfort is possible precisely because it is a liminal space and moment: these brothers will continue their separate lives on opposite ends of the world. Mike Siv is immediately comfortable with his brother and his aunt, but is still not quite at ease with his father. He hears from his aunt that the reason his father stayed behind was because he had another wife. After a family birthday party, Mike Siv confronts his father about his alleged infidelity, asking, “When did you meet your new wife?” Squatting on Siv’s left, his father replies, “When I had to escape concentration camp, I had to go into hiding to stay alive. I heard [that] you, your mom, and Nang were all burned to death. I felt all alone and had no one to depend on. This woman helped me out; she practically helped me stay alive.” Siv’s voiceover states that when the Vietnamese invaded the camps and his father escaped, his father discovered his family was still alive. The father continues, “Your mom didn’t want us to separate and she cried 181 and cried. I told her to escape for your future. That persuaded your mom to escape.” Siv stares directly at his father, restraining his anger and frustration. Siv’s voice over accedes, “His decision was right, in a way, because everyone is still alive.” The scenes in which Siv confronts his father can be read as sites of revelation and testimony. Both the father and son share what they have witnessed through the decades of separation, they want to share their losses. To quote Laub again: “Testimonies are not monologues; they cannot take place in solitude. The witnesses are talking to somebody: somebody they have been waiting for a long, long time.” 232 Siv’s confrontations can also be read as a return to traumatic sites, a compulsive repetition, a revisitation of loss. Before he is about the leave Cambodia, Mike Siv confronts his father again. In an upstairs room, in a medium shot, they circle each other on a mat, like wrestlers, then sit down to have a chat. Siv cuts to the chase, “I want to know why I grew up without you. Every day I thought about you and Nang and what happened to our family.” The melancholic subject is ambivalent towards the lost object (or subject), simultaneously feeling love and hatred; nostalgia, guilt, and rage. The melancholic’s relationship to the aggrieved is one of love and resentment. After a pause, his father responds, “I understand but that’s the way it happened. I decided for you to escape. You were too young. All I wanted was for you to be alive. The reason we’re not together is because of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.” Clearly angry and hurt, Mike Siv retorts, “You can blame it on the war, but if a family wants to stay together they could. You did it with your family, why couldn’t’ you do it with ours? If I had to choose, back then, I’d chose to stay together, I 182 would’ve chose to stay together as a family.” The camera zooms in on his father’s face. His father remains silent, unable to speak further. The father is unable to articulate his lifetime of grief and loss to a son who doesn’t understand, to a son with his own private grief and grievances. Perhaps the father also doesn’t understand the reasons for this divide. The poverty of words. Between them is an unbridgeable gap, inconsolable grief. Their silence slices the room like the afternoon sun illuminating the room, leaving sharp shadows on their faces. The viewer does not know the reasons for the father’s silence and the son’s insistence. Perhaps the presence of the camera interferes with any intimate communication between the two. Perhaps the father is unwilling to speak. Perhaps the father realizes that to explain is impossible. The mediation of language is further complicated by the camera’s mediation. There is an act of double witnessing. The son attempts to find the “truth” which evades him. The audience witnesses the subjects creating a documentary and is also privy to the documentary medium’s shortcomings. Siv attempts to engage in testimomy’s “double function” of initiation of recovery and social discourse. Through his act of testifying his hurt and pain to his father, he hopes to initiate recovery of years of loss. Through collaborating with Nakasako on the documentary, he hopes to have his experiences become part of larger discourse on Asian American (particularly Khmer American) experience and the afterlife of trauma. Yet his attempts partly falter—he cannot recover his lost father and “the years living without him,” or make his sense of family complete. Silence and void. This previous scene again illustrates the failure of language. “All I wanted was for you to be alive.” “I would’ve chose to stay together as a family.” 183 Between the two utterances is a world of loss. The father’s and his son’s intentions to communicate their personal truths falter. I highlight this scene because the moment when communication and language breaks down captures the ambivalence both protagonists embody. This moment disrupts the desire for resolution. This scene, out of all the scenes in the documentary, distills the incommensurability of experiences not through narration or voiceover, but through simple silence. The father’s shocked, sad silence, his act of refusal, encapsulates so many things in an instant. The father’s expression conveys weariness, survivor’s guilt and frustration. The son looks on. Through the first-person narration of the film, the audience is primed to identify with Siv. After all, the documentary is seen, sometimes literally, through his eyes. But the point of identification splits. The viewer may more readily identify with the father and understand his choices, depending on the subjectivity of the given viewer. Figure 17: Mike Siv confronts his father in Refugee 184 In the final scene, the three friends end their journey with a visit to the “killing fields.” Usually boisterous and charismatic, the three are solemn as they look at the open mass graves. The camera pans across the wooden signs which recounts in English the numbers of dead executed at each plot. Passing a golden stupa, Mike Siv’s voice over states, “ . . . being at [the graves] and saying goodbye to Nang, I’ve been thinking the idea of separation and real separation. My dad couldn’t say he was sorry because that meant he was wrong. Because I’m his son and he wants me to be proud of him. Even though I was disappointed he wasn’t the man I wanted him to be, I got to accept that because he is my dad.” Siv has an ambivalent, melancholic relationship with his father. The viewer may conclude that for the Sivs there is clear right or wrong path, only ambivalence and confusion. The father did not apologize because in his eyes, he did nothing wrong. He achieved his stated aim of keeping everyone alive. The son’s insistence on an apology and his father’s refusal may be a cultural and generational gulf that cannot be overcome. Mike Siv is young: maybe one day he will understand his father’s sacrifices. I am teary-eyed typing these words; this documentary reminds me of my own ambivalent relationship with my deceased father. Part of our distance when my father was alive was because there were so many things we couldn’t explain to each other—the alienation of assimilation, war time tragedies, his hope in the American dream and my teenage refusal of it. We couldn’t cross the cultural and generational abyss. The concluding filmic sequence also makes me think of leave-taking and separation. Physical and emotional distance can be unbearable. 185 Mike Siv expresses his lifetime of hurt and rage in Refugee. In contrast to Panh’s documentary, Refugee features first-person narrative, a self-reflexive narrator. While Panh’s masterful film shows the audience the effects of trauma, Mike Siv tells the audience his ambitions and disappointments. Both documentary strategies have their strengths.S-21 may be more “sophisticated” in terms of its presentation and deft touch, but Refugee has a candid directness. As poststructuralists would note, the “readers” of these filmic texts will have another level of interpretation and reception beyond the authors’ intent. While the films address gaps in representation, they challenge yet unwittingly reinscribe certain binaries including peace/ war, first world/ third world, victim/ perpetrator. For instance, the Tenderloin is presented as a contemporary war zone, connecting it to past wars in Southeast Asia. Cambodia cannot escape the specter of its civil war. While S-21’s subjects live in a time of peace, they still suffer from the effects of war. Although Nath questions the distinctions between victim and perpetrator, these categories are upheld throughout the film. In a different manner, Siv and his father both claim victimhood. In both films, appeals to “universal” ideals of responsibility are contrasted with the particulars of Cambodian history. Spencer Nakasako’s and Rithy Panh’s documentaries as well as Vann Nath’s devastating paintings raises the question, What is the relationship between ethics and aesthetics? Does the act of translating grief and trauma transform it? What is at stake in 186 the act of translation? In the next segment I ponder the role of academic translation, or interpretations of trauma, and of trauma texts. Trauma Chameleon: An Ending about Endings In an article entitled “Consuming Trauma; or, the Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” literary scholar Patricia Yeager self-reflexively questions the field and the object of trauma studies. She states that liberal academics exist in a dialectic between pleasure and pain. We foster and facilitate the circulation of painful narratives and concomitantly partake of the pleasurable academic economies afforded by those narratives: conference papers, publications, careers. We seek the pleasures of “merely circulating” and “consuming trauma.” The academic’s consumption of trauma may be related to the melancholic’s self-devouring: “Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego . . . The ego wishes to incorporate this object into itself, and the method by which it would do so, in this oral or cannibalistic stage, is by devouring itself.” 233 The melancholic consumes these conflicting feelings, feeds upon himself. Academic discourse feeds upon itself, is self-referential. In consuming trauma, in the feeding frenzy of traumatic narratives, there is both pleasure and pity, reverence and revulsion. Is trauma so easily changeable, and so easily appropriated to become mere texts for analysis? What are the pitfalls when real traumas become interpreted, translated, trivialized into academic discourse—articles with clever wordplay? Yeager asks, “Given the danger of commodification and the pleasures of academic melancholy—of those exquisite acts of mourning that create conceptual profit—what are our responsibilities when we write 187 about the dead?” 234 She criticizes academics who appropriate traumatic events without regard for their suffering subjects. To paraphrase a question raised at a recent conference, Does trauma studies and creative work engage in a form of rubbernecking? Does liberal academic discourse and cultural production, and discourse about trauma in particular, reify the very conditions and social inequities we write and create work about and critique? Is all this self-reflexivity merely a form of guilt-reducing, ineffectual navel gazing? Does our work make light of—or bring into light—horrific scenes? Which scenes and sites get highlighted, and for what reasons? The Cambodian genocide and historical trauma in general has fueled a “cottage industry” of artists, writers, filmmakers, academics who produce works and engage in dialogue at a reasonably comfortable remove. Conferences, film festivals, publications and art exhibitions may be “safe” spaces to engage these horrors. The very hierarchies and state policies responsible for such terror may not be effectively challenged or ever changed. The fact that an audience is more knowledgeable about a certain issue does not mean there will be action. Testimony and pedagogy may not be sufficient. Witnessing and bearing witness is not enough. If you are victims, then what are we? The editors of Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity question the ways in which certain traumas, genocides, disasters become legible, consumable. They ask, how has the Jewish Holocaust become the measure, the standard bearer of holocausts? How have certain spaces and places become synonymous with tragedy? What are the media and political strategies in which “local” tragedies (genocide, natural disasters, and so on) receive international attention and assistance? 235 What is the afterlife of trauma? 188 In light of these issues, how does one engage with a film like S-21 or Refugee? How do these diasporic cultural productions function as a form of witnessing, of testimony? And who is listening? In both S-21 and Refugee, scenes of return and confrontation mark agency, refusal, rage—responses that are highlighted by ambivalence and silences. Mike Siv’s “acceptance” of his father’s refusal to apologize and his ultimate disappointment just reconfirm his self-justified world view. Siv’s collaboration has assuaged his own ache but there is no real recognition of his father’s guilt and pain. In utilizing, or perhaps cannibalizing, Siv’s narrative (among other disadvantaged Southeast Asian youth), Nakasako has built a successful career as an independent filmmaker. I do not doubt Nakasako’s sincerity or his intensions. Refugee’s audience is primarily a college-educated (or currently in college) Asian American one who may consume this documentary as any other insightful cultural text: I now understand Cambodian Americans and what some of them went through better; next... S-21 has achieved much recognition for shedding light on a period Cambodian terror. It has served as a reminder, a wakeup call, as evidence against those who would deny the genocide’s severity, or the fact that it even happened. In essence, the documentary is framed as a sort of battle: victims interrogate their interrogators; the audience roots for the underdogs, the survivors. But they are all survivors, both “victims” and “perpetrators.” The shame is that the world needed reminding that this invisible past existed because this developing country isn’t significant enough to keep track of, to acknowledge. A “local” Khmer filmmaker would not be able to get the same message about the Khmer Rouge across to the rest of the world. They do not have proper access to 189 international networks, funding, and cultural capital. The film had to play the game of international festivals and prizes in order to get its message across because the distant echo of genocide wasn’t sufficient or important enough. Finally after decades of silence, something reverberates across the distance. The one who hears must take witness. The diasporic filmmakers had to return to their site of loss. The singular return is not seen to be a pathological compulsion to repeat—its power and efficacy is in its singularity, its material and historical specificity, its capacity for a multiplicity of creative responses. The singular return is also a confrontation—a confrontation and acknowledgment of ghosts and losses, a gesture at future returns. This confrontation is a means of engagement, of bearing witness, of shifting paradigms. But in the singular return, the moment of confrontation, there have already been many psychic returns, many repetitions that have already preceded to make this single act possible. The return encompasses the repetition compulsion, to revisit again and again the wound. Regardless of the number of times, to return is a melancholic gesture. Lot’s wife looked back once and turned to salt. But Panh and Nakasako urge us to look back, to return to a place we might not remember or recognize. Look again. The witness has been waiting for this moment for a long, long time. How does one remember Tuol Sleng, its survivors and perpetrators? What questions openly engage the future and past? What are our responsibilities when we write about the dead? What are our responsibilities to the living? Vann Nath writes in his memoir: Nowadays there is talk about closing the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide. There are those who argue that this will help heal the wounds and bring our fractured nation back together. . . However I feel very strongly that the museum should stay open . . . [If the museum is abandoned], it means that those men, women, and 190 children who died there were simply eliminated; that there deaths were meaningless. 236 The construction of meaning and memory is a complex, uneasy task. Why did it happen like that? In many ways Refugee and S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine are fragments. Fragmented stories, memories, lives. We are all conspirators, we are all victims. I am haunted by the guards’ melancholy expressions, Vann Nath’s silent paintings, a father’s silence, the piles of written “confessions” in thin yellowed notebooks, the oscillating ceiling fan and flickering, the blue television screen in Mike and Nang’s old hotel room, the blood stains on the prison walls—what remains. 191 Chapter Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life; translated from the German by E. F. N. Jephcott (London ; New York : Verso, 1978). Alexander, Jeffrey C., et al., eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2004. Boyle, Deirdre. “Shattering Silence: Traumatic Memory and Reenactment in Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Volume 50, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 95-106, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009). Chandler, David P.. “Revisiting the Past in Democratic Kampuchea: When Was the Birthday of the Party?” Pacific Affairs 56.2 (Summer 1983). ___________. “‘The Killing Fields’ and Perceptions of Cambodian History,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 92-97. ___________. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkely: University of California Press, 1994). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia; translation and foreword by Brian Massumi (London : Athlone Press, 1988). Duffy, Terrence. Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1. (John Hopkins University Press, Feb. 1994), pp. 82-104. Samphan, Khieu. L’histoire récente du Cambodge et mes prises de position (Reflection on Cambodian History Up to the Era of Democratic Kampuchea) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). Shay, Christopher. “The Khmer Rouge Tribunal: Cambodia’s Healing Process. Time magazine. 30 November 2009. Online 27 May 2011. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1943373,00.html Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955). David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992). 192 Foucault, Michel. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. Discipline and punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). Hinton, Alexander Laban. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Hughes, Rachel. “Memory and Sovereignty in Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials.” In Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives, edited by Susan E. Cook, 257-79. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006. Keo, Dacil. “Fact Sheet on ‘S-21’ Tuol Sleng Prison.” Searching for the Truth magazine. December 6, 2010. Phnom Penh: Documentation Center of Cambodia. PDF link: http://www.dccam.org/Archives/Documents/Confessions/pdf/Fact_Sheet_on_S- 21_Tuol_Sleng_Prison.pdf Miller, Nancy K. and Jason Tougaw, eds. Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2002). Nakasako, Spencer. Refugee (Oakland: Vietnamse Youth Development Workshop, 2003). Panh, Rithy. “Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy,” Mānoa: In the Shadow of Ângkor 16.1 (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), pp. 108-126. Panh, Rithy, dir., S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, DVD (Cambodia: First Run Features, 2003). Ledgerwood, Judy. “The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes: National Narrative.” Museum Anthropology 21, no. 1 (1997): 82-98. Owen, Taylor and Ben Kiernan. “Bombs over Cambodia.” The Walrus (Canada), Oct. 2006, pp. 62-69. Rofel, Lisa. “Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9(3): 637-639. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). St. John, Ronald Bruce. Revolution, Reform and Regionalism in Southeast Asia : Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (London ; New York : Routledge, 2006). 193 Sheer, Robert. “Cambodia’s Anguish: Made in the USA,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1997. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). Moore, Lisa. “Recovering the Past, Remembering Trauma: The Politics of Commemoration at Sites of Atrocity.” Journal of Public and International Affairs, Princeton: Princeton University, Spring, 2009. Young, Marilyn. The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). 194 Chapter Three Fragments and (Post-)Colonial Memory: Leang Seckon and Hồng-An Trương’s Personal and Public Archives Welcome to the Kingdom of Wonder. In Phnom Penh I sometimes feel like I run a guesthouse—there are seemingly endless visitors. Some are interested in temples and trauma. Others are not. My friend Chương-Đài is visiting Phnom Penh August 2009 en route back to Sài Gòn and ultimately Los Angeles. She wanted to meet some artists so I arranged a few intimate, casual dinners. I contact Fleur Bourgeois-Smith, artist Leang Seckon’s dedicated assistant and dear friend. A New Zealander and long time resident of Phnom Penh, Bourgeois-Smith suggests Romdeng, a restaurant I had never been to. It is the sister restaurant of the nondescript Friends Restaurant, often overcrowded with expat tourists. Both are run by an NGO (Non Governmental Organization) that trains former street kids to work in the sister restaurants, among its other businesses, a nail salon and a gift shop in the Russian Market. 237 My bourgeois self is pleasantly surprised to see an elegantly restored colonial building with a blue-tiled pool skirted by a lush garden so we decide to sit outside. Recently returned from Europe, Seckon arrives a few minutes later, perfectly coiffed as usual (think updated Elvis pompadour meets K-pop blowout) in a black T-shirt screen printed black and white with iconic palm trees, hills, a Mustang, power lines and the word “Hollywood.” Exchanging hugs, I tell him in Khmer, “It’s my first time here, I’m a virgin.” He smiles broadly and says to all of us in a mock-diva tone in English, “I come here many times. I buy a drink, I swim, they leave me alone.” 195 We ask Seckon about his solo show in London at Rossi & Rossi Gallery. I heard earlier from Fleur that following the success of his show, he has bought a new Lexus. Cars in Phnom Penh cost twice as much as they do in the United States due to heavy import taxes yet the streets are chocked with luxury SUVs in rush hour. Looking again at the fronds on Seckon’s shirt and the palm trees by the pool, I think, Hollywood indeed. Leang is a star. In the art world, there is a magnanimous and maligned term, “art star” to refer to well-known and ambitious would-be well known artists. In a way, it is a sort of Hollywood system, with international galleries vying to promote their artists to global stardom. In Rossi & Rossi’s press and publications on Seckon, he is hyped as Cambodia’s top living artist. Cambodia’s (next-)top-artist’s tin-roofed studio and family home is in one of the poorest parts of Phnom Penh, near Boeung Kak Lake. To get there one makes a left turn off Monivong Boulevard, just before the white-walled gates guarding the luxuriant grounds of the French Embassy, driving until the pavement ends. Then the fun begins since one must maneuver the bumpy dirt road mined with large rocks and potholes. I don’t mind driving on dirt roads (sometimes I prefer them), but strangely enough this must be one of the bumpiest roads in Southeast Asia. I sometimes wonder if it is faster to walk as my motorcycle and I bounce along small craters, trying to avoid the rainbow- hued street vendors, lanky children playing and elegant grandmothers, surprised that I haven’t gotten a flat tire yet. Perhaps his new luxury purchase is an old Lexus but I am happy to hear he has sold most of his works in London at a high rate, especially in light of the current global 196 economic crisis. In comparison, many of his local and international colleagues who show at respected galleries and cultural centers in Phnom Penh such as Java Gallery or the Centre Culturel Français (run by the French government) price their works relatively low, often around $200US for a painting because the collector base in Phnom Penh usually consist of NGO workers. In Phnom Penh, there is a wide range of pricing, but still international artists such as Marine Ky (a Cambodian Chinese artist who splits her time between France, Australia and Cambodia) find that they have to sell their work at a fraction of what they demand overseas. 238 This scene evokes multiple locations, histories and subject positions: London, Phnom Penh, Sài Gòn, Hollwood, all framed by a French colonial mansion now run by a local organization. The French colonial power structure has been displaced by a culture of NGOs, which still preserve vast disparities in wealth and customs. Histories merge, a schizophrenic collage. After dinner, I imagine Seckon in his sleek new old Lexus SUV cruising along the fluorescent billboards lining Monivong Boulevard back home to dank Boeng Kak Lake, past the rotten teeth of modernist buildings, freshly painted colonial facades and looming skeletons of high-rises. This chapter looks at Cambodian painter, performance artist and collagist Leang Seckon and Vietnamese American experimental filmmaker Hồng-An Trương’s return to historical archives. Throughout the chapter, I make the case that the reappearance of history’s fragments—colonial and modern, as well as the formal use of fragmentation in their works question the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernizing projects. I 197 conclude by suggesting that Seckon and Trương’s return to personal and public archives is symptomatic of Derrida’s archive fever. Heavyweight Thinking of return, let’s turn back to Seckon’s studio, briefly back in time, just before Seckon’s London show. It is November 2009 and I stop by for an informal studio visit after spending some time next door at Sopheap Pich’s studio to catch up. Seckon is excited and anxious. An aunt helps him sew finishing touches as his mother looks on. Although he has participated in high-profile exhibitions in Japan, China, Burma, among other locations, he is uncertain about how his work will be received in London. At first glance, it looks like he is making large quilts. Upon closer inspection, the large canvases, each measuring approximately 59 X 51 inches, consist of patches of fabric with painted images—a patchwork of references. His hand-embellished collages of archival photographs, stickers, cigarette boxes and cutouts from magazines, leaflets and newspapers are smaller, about 16 X 20 inches. The title of his first “autobiographical” series of work, Heavy Skirt, refers to the skirt his mother wore when pregnant with Seckon. She had only one skirt which she mended and patched until it grew heavier and heavier. Similarly, Seckon’s canvases are patched, stitched, embellished with images and stories, and memories, real and imagined, individual and collective, until they become heavy, ripe with associations. Throughout this chapter I put the word “autobiographical” in quotes to refer to Seckon’s work because the series merges historical and mass media fantasies, stereotypes and fact. It is not because I question Seckon’s sincerity or the truth- value of his struggles. An unlikely cast of characters and symbols appear in his art: 198 seventies Cambodian rock and roll stars, flowers, Queen Elizabeth, fields, Khmer Rouge cadres, Elvis, pandas, zombies, snowflakes and bombs. Laceration and lace. Welcome to his world. The patched images and references make perfect sense for a disjointed life. “Collage is the only way to capture it,” artist-activist/ writer Anne Moore observes about Seckon’s work. Collage, sewing, stitching and patching—all techniques of culling fragments—is the only way to capture life’s incredible splendor, and for survivors, its “black lace destruction.” The artist was born amidst heavy American bombing of Viêt Nam and Cambodia in 1974 in Pier Reang, Prey Veng province, forty five minutes from Phnom Penh. Rural Pier Reang, a farming community, is close to the Viêt Nam border. Speaking of his childhood, Seckon says, “My mom, she confused—the bomb from the sky. The tank is Vietnamese, because the Prey Veng province is the border to Vietnam and Srey Vieng. The Vietnam soldier take the tank and come to Cambodia to make the people afraid.” 239 It is a period of confusion, uncertainty and instability with competing Vietnamese, American, Chinese and Khmer ideologies at war. Nixon’s secret illegal bombings were partly aimed at defeating Việt Cong nestled in the eastern border of Cambodia. The bomb from the sky. While U.S. officials danced around discussing Cambodia and Laos at the time, it was domino theory at work. The Pet Shop Boys have a song called Domino Dancing; part of its lyrics read, “all day, all day, watch them all fall down. All day, all day, domino dancing.” Although the Boys are singing about tainted love and perhaps war, I wouldn’t be surprised if this song was on Seckon’s studio playlist, along with Madge, Khmerican (Khmer/American) 199 band Dengue Fever, Kylie Minogue and sixties’ Khmer rockers such as Sin Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea. This soundtrack, with an additional dose of hip hop, can be heard in the high-rise malls and traditional markets of Phnom Penh. There is always music in the air, regardless of light-hearted or heavy times. Cambodian rock and roll reached its zenith during the sixties and early seventies, combining American and English influences with traditional Khmer melodies and rhythms and stunning vocals for a unique sound. The collage entitled The Soldier Singing (Thiehien Jrieng Jomrieng) captures this mood. A cutout of a young Elvis Presley is in the center of the composition, framed by floating flowers and a guitar, with another reproduction image of singer Jeff Buckley on the far left, with a “Live From England” logo below his guitar-strumming navel. A Khmer sticker reads “A good story for kids.” A Mercury records album and painted vinyl record anchors the image. Perhaps these are the “good” stories of the past Seckon grew up with as a child. The other figures are drawn in with accent colors: male and female Khmer singers with red lips, a machine gun, and the singing soldier, whose song conjures up this brew. Looking at Seckon’s pastiche images of singers, soldiers and saints, I can hear Khmer rock and roll reverberating from decades ago, from the then-pristine white modernist buildings, bombs illuminating the urban night sky. During a studio visit in October 2010, I asked him about the singer featured in The Soldier Singing. Perhaps it was a relative or his father. “The singer is me,” he grins. Leang Seckon is also a well-known singer, who has performed on Cambodian national television several times. Hollywood indeed. He has had to sing on different stages in different stages of his life. When he was conscripted to military service for a year in 200 1990, he states that he didn’t want to “carry guns, I only want to put them down and sing.” And sing he did. “I love Khmer music from sixties and seventies. I also listen to Indian music when working. I like pop music too, fun to dance and listen for short time. But when I want to go deep, deep with my thoughts in the studio, I listen to Indian music, I listen to Khmer music.” 240 Similar to his images, Seckon’s taste in music spans many cultures and eras. Figure 18: Leang Seckon, The Singing Soldier (Tiehien Jrieng Jomrieng), 2010, mixed media on canvas, 42 x 52 cm (16 1/2 x 20 1/2 in) Seckon’s larger canvasses also touch upon music and popular culture. In Snowflower Skirt (Somphut Picar Brille), the viewer sees an icy blue sky, with an informal grid of snowflakes framing portraits of what appears to be Michael Jackson with 201 a crown, Queen Elizabeth in profile, a reclining Buddha, a panda, peonies galore, among other symbols. The artist created this work for his London debut. Asking about the piece, he replies that it is his imaginary image of the U.K.: “I never come to England before.” He laughs, “I think there is snow of course, celebrities; the Queen is there too.” 241 His playful comment underscores the media’s construction of national stereotypes, a fact he is keenly aware of since he uses mass media fragments such as magazines, newspapers, and postcards in his collages. This work is vision from the Orient of the Occident, a cool place, both cold and “hot.” Figure 19: Leang Seckon, Snowflower Skirt (Somphut Picar Brille), 2009 mixed media on canvas, 150 x 130 cm (59 x 51 in) 202 Figure 20: Snowflower Skirt detail Seckon is all too familiar with Cambodia’s pigeonhole of strife and genocide for the rest of the world, a fact that he both plays into and rejects. In an interview with curator Tara Shaw-Jackson, he states, “Cambodian history is not only about Pol Pot and today people are getting on with life, although of course Cambodian society has been changed forever, and people’s health is affected, and their relationships.” Telling traumatic histories, his work is also disconcertingly decorative. There is a reason to his logic: “To always talk about the difficult details of life and history hurts and makes people upset, so, my work is full of flowers too! So yes you might think you see a bomb 203 in my painting, but it is a bomb garden.” His work is gorgeous, over laden in a faux-naif way. Humor and horror coexist; wit can be a coping strategy. Difficult times call for absurdity. Despite all of the horror evoked by his paintings, they are above all, beautiful. He tells harsh painful stories about the past, but in a beatific Buddhist way. Beauty is a survival tactic. In another time and place, in the shadow of the Great Depression, lipstick sales soared. Beauty survives. Everyday in the halls of Tuol Sleng, visitors place white flowers on the metal-framed beds used for torture. Over time the beds have rusted to the color of dried blood. The white blossoms are prayers, they assuage the ghosts roaming the halls—grace and beauty amidst horror. After a lifetime of grief, what is there left to do but to smell the flowers, to cry and laugh? Bombs and rock and roll. Realm of Hungry Ghosts In Seckon’s universe, karma and kitsch go together. Snowflower Skirt may be the most outlandishly joyful work from this series. He is both sincere and ironic. The surface shimmers like glitter. I think of the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh and its glitter and glamour. Some of the interiors combine Cambodian wooden intricacy with French Baroque gilded grandeur. Cambodia has always been a cosmopolitan hub in Southeast Asia, an Angkorian empire, the Pearl of the Orient. Mosques, boulangeries, missionaries, malls and golden wats are all part of Cambodia’s landscape. Phnom Penh and London are both diverse global cities—in both locales the sacred and profane go hand in hand. So it makes sense that British royalty shares the same constellation as multi-armed Shiva, a panda and resurrected Jesus in this composition. In other works spiritual images also emerge. Speaking about religion, Seckon states 204 For me, I know I’m very active with art, but I still pay respect to religion, especially Buddha. I find peace for life in my artwork but there is a fire inside sometimes, burning me and hurting me. At those times my art is not enough support for me and I need more, so I think on the Buddha’s words saying something about how to dampen this fire inside. 242 The fire burning inside is cooled by spirituality’s calming presence. Cambodia is Buddhist country after all. It also is a cool place, hot, “hot,” but rarely cold. The overall pattern of snowflakes and flowers also remind me of the intricate tiles found in homes and temples in Phnom Penh. Figure 21: Wheel of Life Meditating on a floor cushion in Wat Langka, the brightly hued tiles morph in front of me: the circular, organic patterns interweave becoming trees, flowers, humans. The effect is similar in this work: individual fragments merge and morph, shifting the affect of the total composition. Silhouettes of flowers look like a blue china pattern, or an aerial view of the earth. It is a blue world, a blue sky, a blue constellation, but it is not sad. It is intimate, intricate, and full of humor. Some snowflakes resemble flowers, or are embedded with flowers. Others snowflakes look like the Buddhist Wheel of Life or Wheel of Becoming (often found in Tibetan art), bhavacakra in Sangskrit. The Wheel of Life depicts the cycles of samsara—the cycles of suffering. It is a sort of map of the inner and outer worlds, of six different realms—among them the realm of the gods, the realm of the jealous gods, the human realm, the realm of the hungry ghosts and the hell realm (Trungpa). They are metaphors for states of mind. For instance, the hell realm is the manifestation of anger, a warring state, whether it is the rage of an inner war or hot 205 combat. In a meditation retreat, Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh was asked to describe the realm of hungry ghosts, where the ghosts have giant bellies and tiny pin-hole mouths. Their hunger is insatiable. He answered with a single word: America. It could easily be England or any other materialistic consumerist nation. Figure 22: Wheel of Becoming In Seckon’s renderings of different worlds, gods and monsters inhabit the same realm. “Mappings” of the wheel of life, or the universe also appear in Western traditions. Ancient Greek astronomers grouped the heavens into a star-bearing circle. Western astrology depicts the twelve celestial signs in a ring; its counterpart is the Asian zodiac. William Blake often used circular imagery in his renderings of the universe. In 206 Snowflower Skirt the East and West’s spiritual and cultural icons merge. The East and West are not polar opposites. They inhabit the same (visual) plane. The snowflake “frames” also look like medallions, military medals of honor. In other paintings, soldiers wear medals, symbols of honor and horror. Snowflower Skirt is the artist’s projection of a future time and space (his future trip to England, which is now past), just as some of his works are reflections of past geographies and memories, jubilant and tragic, stitched together. Bloody Shirt (Aow Bralac Chhiem) features a multitude of military medals adorning a surreal shirt made of pockets and patches of lace, camouflage, khaki, an old military uniform, and traditional Khmer checkered krama—a scarf all Khmer were forced to wear during the Pol Pot regime. The back pocket of a pair of jeans is combined with the remnants of a young man’s shirt, soaked in blood after he was beat up. The bric-a- brac shirt speaks of the struggles for power in Cambodia: decades of French occupation, Sihanouk’s (vain)glorious rule, the U.S.-backed Lon Nol period (which deposed Sihanouk) starting in 1970, Khmer Rouge takeover, Vietnamese “liberation” in 1979, the current Hun Sen administration… The “bloody shirt” lacks a head, although a circular form outlines its absence. The shirt is flat; there is no body to fill it out. Perhaps this is a commentary about the past several decades and the confusion over political turmoil. The shirt does not refer to a specific moment. Instead it encompasses Cambodia’s modern history. It is a rag; it has soaked up all the blood. Echoing the mother’s patchwork skirt, this patchwork shirt—also heavy with war and war medallions—is hollow. The lack of a 207 body may signify the populace vanished as the result of conflicts, or the empty rhetoric and promises of the shifting regimes. Figure 23: Leang Seckon, Bloody Shirt (Aow Bralac Chhiem),2009 mixed media on canvas, 150 x 130 cm (59 x 39 in) 208 Modern Love In contrast, Modern Skirt (Somphut Sivilay) reveals the buoyancy of the era before the American bombings, before the Khmer Rouge regime. It depicts a garden, a pattern of spade-like trees on which grow vignettes and portraits of smiling, elegantly dressed couples, foliage and apsaras—celestial nymphs—playing musical instruments in the clouds. Their music inspires rain which fills the lakes teeming with fish; the rice fields are abundant from the downpour. Flowers everywhere. It is like an upturned deck of playing cards or Tarot cards: the King of Spades, the Queen of Hearts, Death, The Lovers. What will the future hold? Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, Doris Day sang in 1956. The 1950s and 1906s in Cambodia is seen as a golden age. King Sihanouk declared independence from French colonial rule in 1953, embarking on projects aimed at crafting a strong modern national identity. 209 Figure 24: Leang Seckon, Modern Skirt (Somphut Sivilay), 2009 mixed media on canvas, 59 x 51 in In the collage entitled Peace Tree (Damcheu Sondepheap), a black and white photo of a youthful King Norodom Sihanouk is framed with an ornate crown, almost a halo. Known as the King-Father of Cambodia, he is adoringly referred to by Cambodians as សមេ ្ដច ឪ or Sâmdech Euv which translates literally to “Prince Dad” or “Lord Dad.” Who’s your daddy? However, the true focus of this piece is the beloved Independence Monument 210 ( វ ិ មា ន ឯ ក រា ជ្ យ or Viamean Ekareach), also known as Victory Monument, designed by renowned Khmer architect Vann Molyvann. It appears multiple times in the small composition. The Monument, along with Angkor Wat, are Cambodia’s most well-known and revered national symbols. On the left an apsara and a mustached Frenchman dressed in white with a beret hold a small version of the monument—it is the gift of independence. They stand on a patterned field of lotuses. The Independence Monument is the peace tree. Built in 1958 in the form of a lotus-shaped stupa, it stands proudly today in perfect condition in the center of the city at the intersection of Norodom and Sihanouk Boulevards, a section of the city lined with colonial mansions. On the left center of the composition is a cutout photograph of a real tree. “The top of the tree, this peace tree,” is the king and Viamean Ekareach (Independence Monument),” Seckon points out. “The roots of the tree are the people.” The people are the roots of society, they give it stability. In the image, they are paying their respects. Hand-drawn roots connect them with the black and white tree. In the center of the piece, next to this tree, the artist draws in graphite more pillars of society: three barefoot women (perhaps they are peasants) steadfastly holding rifles. “After Independence, many women join,” Seckon notes. Although Sihanouk gained independence peacefully, this independence was also hard-won by the people through their staunch support. 211 Figure 25: Leang Seckon, Peace Tree (Damcheu Sondepheap), 2010 mixed media on canvas, 42 x 52 cm (16 1/2 x 20 1/2 in) Cultural production flowered. Film, modern fashion and music bloomed. There was a building boom from 1953-1970 known as Cambodian Modernism or New Khmer Architecture flourished under the patronage of Sihanouk. This brand of modernism championed by Vann Molyvann combined Cambodian traditional aesthetics and details with Corbusian high modernism. Is it ironic that a name synonymous with modern nationalist Khmer architecture was trained in France, the country’s recent colonizers? All of these activities were part of the nation-building project after independence. Through an ambitious public works project, the nation sought to create itself anew, a 212 modern nation full of confidence, no longer hindered by the shackles of imperialism. King Sihanouk’s films (he is also a filmmaker and composer) show Phnom Penh in its modern glory: a happy, orderly citizenry; angular, state of the art architecture. It is modern love. The euphoria is tangible. The future’s not ours to see. Molyvann’s famous buildings can still be seen in Phnom Penh today, including the iconic rounded cheese wedge shape of the Chaktamok Theatre; the still edgy, impressive 80,000 seat National Sports Complex and the recently refurbished yellow Art Deco-esque dome of Pshar Thmey. Modern Skirt is a nostalgic painting. Some of the portraits are rendered in black and white, preserving the sentimental affect of old family photographs in albums. Although I do not know the individuals, there is a sense of familiarity. I think of the black and white images of my own family, of the lost years. This work also recalls the branching hierarchies of family trees, except there are multiple trees, multiple connections. A small collage, misleadingly entitled Soldiers Arrive at the Palace (Tiehien Mok Dol Veang)—one thinks of invasion!—but this collage also evokes the period in which the king leads this cultural renaissance. Perhaps the soldiers are there for a peaceful state ceremony, full of pomp and circumstance. Color cutouts of traditional Khmer dancers are interspersed with black and white photographs of men in uniform. I am not sure if they are from Seckon’s family archive yet I am reluctant to ask. And over these images are pencil drawings of architecture and painted flourishes. Space and time is collapsed. I ask him if this collage depicts a particular incident. He replies, “In my work many things are combined, many times at once . . . These dancers are there but they do not know the soldiers come, it is another time.” 243 This work speaks of the transitions of 213 different eras, different states of mind. The grandeur and glory of the palace and Sihanouk’s reign is abruptly interrupted by more ominous times. Still one is not sure entirely sure if this is the past or the present. Speaking of his small-scaled collages and the collage-like effect of his larger paintings, the artist states: When we look at collage, we see the image is not far away and not close; there is no perspective like in a realistic rendering of something. But collage has its own perspective, with its own logic or lack of logic. Just like nature and our lives make sense and they do not, we understand and we do not. 244 The mental image of these glorious and gory times is not far away and not close. Sometimes the memory of trauma is simultaneously too far away and too close for comfort. Memory is not perspectival vision. Memory, like collage has its own logic or lack of logic, its own unique vantage point. Modern Skirt does not make sense but it makes perfect sense. It is not painted from a singular perspective with a single vanishing point. Similar to Sandrine Llouquet’s scrambled lines in her video (discussed in chapter one), Seckon does not use the logic of linear perspective. He does not subscribe to Enlightenment views of progress. This painting is an aerial view of a garden, but there are also portraits. It collapses space and time. The cycle of rain and growth is represented in the same patterned manner as the trees. Further elaborating on his layered work, “In my collages I use not only old things, but new things too—just whatever I feel to use at the time. Cambodian people when they see my collages feel: ‘Oh this looks very old, like something secret’ and they feel a bit strange. Sometimes they feel it is very interesting.” 245 Looking at Seckon’s paintings and collages feels very intimate, regardless of the size, it feels like he is sharing a secret with 214 us, whispering in our ears, telling us a meandering, riveting narrative, full of laughter and heartache. I did not ask him who the soldiers were in Soldiers Arrive at the Palace because I want to only half-know, I want for the secret to remain his. And some things are open secrets, or still kept secret. Seckon’s personal narratives are a strategy of discussing sensitive matters. He is simply telling stories from his life, both factual and fantastic, not making overt political critique. But Seckon is not a mere chronicler. He is critical of the present state of Cambodian affairs. He observes, “People nowadays give many offerings and make many ceremonies but don’t seem to really make other connections about their personal behavior and its effects.” 246 Seckon acknowledges and embraces the many contradictions of his country—corruption and generosity, historical amnesia and tribunal testimonials, landmines and resorts, Lexuses and shantytowns. The Cambodian government, like Việt Nam, controls all television stations and has a firm grip on the media. The Hun Sen government commonly threatens, bans, or sues publications or journalists that are critical of the government. Human Rights Watch notes that “Reporters covering sensitive issues risk dismissal, imprisonment, physical attack, or even death. Politically motivated murders of opposition journalists, such as Khim Sambo, who was killed in July 2008, and many others in the past 15 years remain unresolved.” Many citizens refuse to go on record for fear of repercussions. In October 2009, a new penal code was passed in which disinformation and defamation is listed as criminal offenses. As a result, critics can be prosecuted for peacefully expressing their views on government institutions or individuals. In July 2009, editor Dam Sith shut down 215 long-standing opposition paper Moneaksekar Khmer as the only means to prevent his imprisonment. 247 In this climate, beauty is a survival strategy. Beauty survives. There is still beauty in the shadow of warplanes in Golden Flower Skirt (Somphut Picar Mier). The painting is a large checkered grid of green fields of color, again resembling a giant quilt. Filling alternate squares are traditional rural Khmer wooden homes on slilts, pagodas with peaked roofs, a bridge, stupas, large and small flowers. Look again. There is an ominous airplane near the center of the composition, almost hidden in plain sight. The large sun-flowers simultaneously resemble palm trees, dahlias, children’s wind wheels, bomb targets. These are the bomb flowers, this is the bomb garden. Oh there is so much beauty and so much devastation. The flowers serve as camouflage. It is the shock of recognition: what first appears to be an idyllic landscape of homes and greenery turns into a map of wreckage. This painting evokes the grainy seventies documentary footage of airplanes bombing Southeast Asia: first we see foliage and thatched roofs, a village from a distance. Then we see flashes of white—beautiful bombs bursting in air, then orange and red: fire, fire, blood everywhere amidst the green. Too far away and too close for comfort. The mundane surface of everyday life conceals terror. 216 Figure 26: Leang Seckon, Golden Flower Skirt (Somphut Picar Mier), 2009 mixed media on canvas, 59 x 51 in In Cambodia, like many parts of the world touched by strife, historical trauma lies just beneath the surface, hidden. Using a similar strategy of camouflage, Seoul-based artist Lee Young Baek’s (b. 1966, Gimpo) large scale video installation Angel Soldier fills the viewer’s field of vision with a wall of bright flowers, thousands of fake flowers. Look carefully and the viewer sees soldiers stealthily, almost imperceptibly moving through the flowers; they wear military uniforms camouflaged with flowers. This jarring video subverts the conventions of camouflage with flower power, the antiwar symbol in the U.S., associated during the American War in Vietnam with hippies and antiestablishment movements. This playful and provocative work captures the residual, 217 anxiety-laden affects of Korea’s military legacy. The plastic flowers and the soldiers may also point to the flowery rhetoric which disguises military aggression. Beauty and devastation. The devastation continues. In Torn Skirt (Somphut Rohai) the quilt-like grid remains but the human structures have vanished. The composition is a checkered pattern of ashen fields and the looming shadows of fighter planes. A single flower is in the bull’s eye of each grey square: it is a bomb target; it is a wound blooming blood. Again I am reminded me of the plain checkered tiles found in homes or in public buildings throughout Cambodia. The checkers usually consist of two colors: white and black or mustard and burgundy; the latter is more common. I thought the worn tiles at the Bophana Center gallery looked eerily familiar, realizing later that they are echoes of the faded yellow and red tiles at Tuol Sleng. I remember staring at the floor in Tuol Sleng, trying to decipher if the stains on the floor, hidden by the checks, was blood. The checkered pattern of Seckon’s painting recalls the missing homes and buildings, a reminder of the banality of misfortune. Still the grid remains in Flicking Skirt (Somphut Bohbaoeuy).The grid may symbolize an attempt at normalcy, at retaining a sense of order despite the overwhelming ruin. Here the ashen squares have turned into graves, bomb craters consisting of flowery pattern. Still flowers grow. The warplanes, the hell birds have turned into thin birds or spirits, mouths agape, rising from the craters. Birds are among the only things able to escape from the carnage, other than the child protected by deities in the center of the frame and the mother holding her son in fear. Seckon tells me the story of how, as a one- 218 year-old infant, he miraculously survived a bombing unprotected while his mother and brother were stuck inside a bunker, unable to reach him. 248 Figure 27: Leang Seckon, Flicking Skirt (Somphut Bohbaouey), 2009 mixed media on canvas, 150 x 130 cm (59 x 51 in) On the top center of Flicking Skirt there is a monochromatic stenciled outline of what looks like the iconic American eagle as it appears on official crests and currency, its wings and legs, well, spread eagle. At the bottom of the painting appears a nāga, a mythical snake from whom Cambodians trace their lineage. The positioning of the eagle 219 and the snake reveals something of the two countries’ relative positioning within the world, then and now: the United States, although struggling, is still the world’s top superpower while Cambodian often appears near the bottom of world rankings. For instance, in 2010 the World Economic Forum ranked Cambodia as the worst business climate performer of the member nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), a geopolitical and economic organization. 249 Cambodia is still seen within the global imaginary as a poor little country, not the developing economic tiger it strives to be, but falls short of. According to folklore, the Nāga king’s daughter married an Indian Brahmana named Kaundinya. Their union produced the Cambodian people. There are also nāgas within Buddhist imagery; the most well-known nāga is Mucalinda, which is often shown protecting a meditating Buddha. Nāga imagery is everywhere in Cambodia, adorning the Royal Palace, bridges, staircases and pagodas. Phnom Penh’s glitziest casino is called NagaWorld, of course. There are many world legends regarding eagles and snakes, including Babylonian, Aztec, Hindu and Albanian mythology. In the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, sister of the Hindu epic Ramayana (both epics are often quoted in Cambodian art, particularly the latter), the giant eagle-king Garuda and the nāga were born cousins. To cut the story short—the Mahābhārata is four times the length of the Ramayana, and ten times the length of the Odyssey and Iliad combined—Garuda and the nāga become mortal enemies. The artist makes a pointed comment about power and the tense history between Cambodia and the United States. Although the United States has normalized relations to 220 Cambodia and lifted its trade embargo in 1992, the past still casts a long shadow, just as the shadow of the birds and the warplanes hover in Seckon’s work. Figure 28: Leang Seckon, Heavy Skirt (Somphut Mien Domngun), 2009 mixed media on canvas, 150 x 100 cm (59 x 39 in) And the carnage continues. Heavy Skirt (Somphut Mien Domngun) is indeed heavy. Now the grid too has vanished. Only a giant warplane dominates, hovering in a camouflage sky merging with camouflage fields. The aircraft is made up of camouflage figures in silhouette. They fly in formation, like a flock of birds. The amorphous figures look like body bags, bullets, penises, fish, bombs. Bomb from the sky. Flowers fall. Or are 221 they bomb blasts in flower form? The corporeal airplane points downward, its target a smiling black and white couple surrounded by a repeating net of yellow daisies—a golden halo. They couple is nestled in a giant sunflower, an ovum, the sun, an explosion. The repeating yellow daisy pattern inside the giant flower evokes Japanese pop art überstar Takashi Murakami’s “face flowers”—a floor to ceiling “wallpaper” cacophony of gleefully smiling multicolored daisies; they are also depicted sculpturally in globe form as Flower Balls. The sweet smiles become sinister. Murakami’s radiant clusters speak of the vast radiation of the atomic bomb. Its zero death and Technicolor aftermath stretches the limits of representation. The unutterable annihilation of the A-bomb becomes visually bombastic. Murakami plays irony to the hilt. Also merging high and low in a different vein, Murakami’s Cosmic Blossoms were later splashed on luxury Louis Vuitton handbags, instantly becoming must-have wait-list status items across the world. Although both Murakami and Seckon use similar visual vocabulary (e.g. flowers and bombs), Seckon does not utilize the same high gloss deadpan irony as the more senior artist. Crowned as Andy Warhol’s successor, Murakami’s ersatz sheen comments on commercialism, popular and corporate culture in the aftermath of trauma. The nuclear holocaust becomes aesthecized—playful and perverse manga. Seckon, while also concerned with popular culture, takes a different approach. His portraits of survival, drawn and painted in the manner of an “outsider” artist, do not reduce historical narrative to cartoon flatness. Formally his surfaces are more tactile, underlying his concern with rending wounds. 222 We return to the camouflage sky and the camouflage bombs stitched on the painting, fixed in time, the moment before disaster. What happens before, after, in between? It is temporal suspension. Traumatic temporality is a suspension of time and place. Pain is an eternity. Painful memories become the present. We are stuck. Seckon describes this sense of “stuckness” in Stuck-In-The-Mud-Skirt (Somphut Gop Phuot), a painting about “the Khmer Rouge time.” As noted, Seckon’s work is not necessarily about irony or meta- commentary, as Murakami’s work is. This image isn’t about sideward glances or witty self-referential art historical asides. It hits the viewer full on: a frontal grid of human bodies, some wrapped in krama, their faces echoing the infamous portraits of Tuol Sleng. They are laid head to toe, like the doomed prisoners were. Some figures are entirely white, head to toe—they are ghosts. Others have white bodies with faces; they are becoming ghosts, the blood drained from their bodies. Again flowers bloom like blood wounds. They are mummies, zombies. “They still alive, but . . . like stuck” Seckon elaborates. 250 He continues, “They alive and dead. The living dead.” 251 This is the most painful yet most stereotypical image from the series. This is the expected requisite image of terror for an international audience from a Cambodian artist. Will Seckon be stuck or “typecast” as a Cambodian artist, eternally expected to spin tales of woe for a wide-eyed audience? This is what is anticipated after all. And this is partly why his London show sold well. Let me repeat the simplified equation: (third world) horror + beauty= (art world) success! Let me put my cynicism on hold. Seckon’s depictions aren’t necessarily run-of-the-mill approaches to trauma: ghostly faces, gruesome topology, wan expressions, although he does provide ample 223 doses of that. He stitches the delicate line between (self-pitying) traumatic identity politics and formal play—beauty for beauty’s sake. That’s what makes his work refreshing, although it is odd to call it that. If you will, there is a sense of honesty and straightforwardness to his practice. It’s not the standard chic distanced irony of so many young and established artists. Figure 29: Leang Seckon, Stuck-In-The-Mud Skirt (Somphut Gop Phuot), 2009 mixed media on canvas, 150 x 130 cm (59 x 51 in) Seckon speaks about meditation in relationship to his practice. Take it all in: it is about acceptance, about getting on with it. The sinking in-breath: feel its weight in your body. The out breath: let it go—levity. Stitching and painting are meditative processes— he says so. Breathe in, breathe out. Focus. There is a balance in his work. He will not place the same melodramatic note over and over; he is not a one-trick pony. He does not 224 just dwell on nostalgic golden eras, traumatic history or the ambivalent present and future. He accepts it all. Breathe it in. Similar to sitting meditation, there is focused concentration in building up an image: applying layers of paint brushstroke by brushstroke, the repetitive motion of darning a needle through fabric. As an artist, I paint when I want to meditate on an image, on an idea for a long time. Again and again. It continues. Tell me these stories again and again. This is the wheel of life, the cycles of samsara. Reincarnation. Move through the hell realms, through the realm of hungry ghosts to reach enlightenment—nothingness. Outline the past, future and present with paint and thread. Yes war and life is a heavy skirt, but no need to be heavy-handed. Seckon counter-balances his harrowing narrative with a sense of the magnificence of the everyday. “Cambodian history,” let him remind us again, “is not only about Pol Pot.” Cambodia is not genocide. Việt Nam is not a war. He is no melancholic. “Today people are getting on with life.” So get on with it. It is telling that Seckon decides to make his first “autobiographical” body of work for his first significant international solo exhibition. His earlier work dealt with environmental issues using mythic creatures. Recent projects include the fabrication of a 740 foot long nāga site-specific installation from recycled plastic, installed on the Siem Reap River for 2008 World Water Day. As a 2009 artist in residence at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, he constructed a Makara (a mythical Khmer dragon) made of plastic and fabric. The large Makara was then upheld by 110 dancers in a winding performance piece for the 4th Fukuoka Triennale (F4). These two former large-scale projects provided crowd-pleasing spectacle of a different sort. But would giant-lizards-on-parade work for 225 the jaded London art world—the much-touted white hot epicenter of urban hip and home to the now legendary YBAs (Young British Artists) who command millions at auction (most notably art darling Damien Hirst)? Seckon bet against that. He offers instead a humble and humbling exhibition. Where does that leave us now? Figure 30: Leang Seckon, Salty Flower Skirt (Somphut Picar Ompul), 2009 mixed media on canvas, 150 x 130 cm (59 x 51) 226 In the present, of course. But it doesn’t look so promising, Seckon’s aerial vision of contemporary Cambodia. Salty Flower Skirt (Somphut Picar Ompul) looks like a post- Apocalyptic landscape. A river runs through it. More specifically, the Tonlé Sap ( ទមេនេសា ប្ , or Sap River) meanders through the composition and the country, north to south. At the bottom of the painting, one can see homes floating in a giant lake, the river connected to it. A combined lake and river system, it is the largest lake in Southeast Asia and is of great importance to the Khmer psyche and livelihood. The nation’s largest national holiday is the annual Water Festival in November, celebrating the reversal of Tonlé Sap’s currents back to the Mekong. Millions flock from the provinces to party in Phnom Penh. Last November, I couldn’t drive through the streets because there was so much traffic; boulevards were closed off to make room for pedestrians strolling near the riverside. Supporting 3 million people, 75% of Cambodia’s fresh water catch come from the lake. Cham, Cambodians and Vietnamese make their homes in the lake, a floating world. 252 Oh there is so much beauty and so much devastation. Apocalypse Now. Other patches in the painting reveal different sites. The symbols from the other paintings reappear. The wound-flowers, the flower bombs. The camouflage body bags/ bombs/ penises. The entire series is the Wheel of Life; it chronicles the cycle of existence—life, death, rebirth. Tell me again and again. The shadows of airplanes still hover. Again and again. But instead of warplanes perhaps they are the new commercial Cambodia Angkor Air fleet (the national airline), 49% owned by the Vietnamese government. Look, here is Angkor Wat in miniature, and there—plots of graves (skulls and skulls), zombies in 227 karma. And there, still: landmines and bomb craters. One cannot escape the minefield of the past. It haunts us still. Lo, new problems emerge. Stubs of trees: deforestation. A single spade-tree rises from the hacked trees. It echoes the spade-trees of the past, the beautiful modern garden. Cracked earth. Samrab chul, For Sale, read two signs on two fenced plots of land in Khmer and English. Land is being indiscriminately sold off to the highest bidder. In the lower portion of the composition, one can see the sleek and shiny Canadia Bank building, a crane next to it—symbols of development. Direct foreign investment has poured in to the tune of billions of dollars over the past decade. 253 I imagine the greenbacks pouring in like rain during wet season, the streets flooded thigh high; the money flows in endlessly, miraculously, like the currents of the Tonlé Sap. Hundreds of millions are being poured annually into infrastructural development by foreign powers, including China, Australia, South Korea, Germany and others. Again there is a building boom. Will this be the next golden era? Tell me again. After ten years of rapid growth—about ten percent each year—there has been a slump in the economy (only two percent growth in 2009). This has rippled down to all sectors of society, adversely affecting big and small businesses as well as workaday tuk tuk drivers, observes World Bank analyst Stéphane Guimbert. 254 According to the United Nations, the country is still acutely underdeveloped: four million of its 14 million currently live under the poverty line. Maybe Hun Sen’s right, maybe the conditions are ripe for another civil war: the gaps between the haves and have-nots widen. Will I be rich? One the lower left, a lone woman visits a fortune teller at a modest pagoda. The cycle will not end. Tell me again and again. The future’s not ours to see. 228 Sew What? We cannot put things into perspective. Like African American feminist artist Faith Ringgold (b. 1930, Harlem, New York), Seckon uses fabric and paint to tell complex stories using a flat “folk” painting technique which disregards perspective. Ringgold’s large painted “story quilts” critique race and gender issues within dominant Western society with wit and humor, often referencing art history. For instance, her large 1991 story quilt entitled The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles (acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed, pieced fabric border, 74" x 80", WC/Q70) depicts a group of African American women holding up their sunflower quilt, in a vast field of sunflowers as Van Gogh stands in the background to the left, holding a bouquet of, yes, sunflowers. They are all framed by buildings of the village of Arles, the famous artist’s refuge (he created over 300 images of it), rendered in Van Gogh’s signature vibrant blues and yellows. Ringgold was among the first Western female artists to use women’s “craft,” blurring the line between high and low art, challenging long-held masculinist traditions of what is considered fine art. Through her work, she questioned art institutions which often omitted minority perspectives. Quilting has a long history for African Americans. African women adapted quilting from men’s traditional weaving in Africa as they entered America as slaves. The quilts were used by the slave community for various purposes including conservation of individual and collective memories, warmth, storytelling, and as message guides for the Underground Railroad to direct slaves north to freedom. Inspired by Tibetan Buddhist tangkas, Ringgold started sewing borders around her paintings, which led to her first 229 story quilt (Brown). The portable Tangkas—often depicting deities, Buddha’s trials and tribulations, and (aha!) the Wheel of Life— are usually painted on cotton duct or silk, and quilted or embroidered. Ringgold mixes Eastern and Western traditions and “highbrow” and “lowly” visual references in her contemporary work. Seckon also blurs the boundaries between craft and fine art, combining sewing, collage, stitching and painting in his work. He heartily embraces sewing and patching, dismissing its connotations as mere women’s work. Here, gender boundaries are fluid. Cambodia, including the rest of Indochina, has already been seen as feminine entity by its colonizers, by the rest in the West. It is a small beguiling yet possibly poisonous snake, not a giant forceful Eagle who snacks on them. Why not embrace these contradictions? Akin to Ringgold’s early artistic sewing collaborations with her late mother, Seckon also seeks inspiration from his mother’s sewing and patching. Her heavy skirt still weighs heavy on his mind. Patching is a spiritual activity; mending is meditation— cobbling tattered pasts, collaging blood-stained painful fragments into a semblance of hope. A country torn asunder can only scramble to patch, sew together its future, regardless of how bleak. Basic sewing employs approximately 300,000 of Cambodia’s 13.4 million people, many whom send back remittances to family members in the countryside who survive on less than a dollar a day. As I write this in October 2010, thousands of Cambodian garment workers are going on a week-long strike in Phnom Penh to seek higher wages. My trilingual friend Socheat now earns about US$60 a month working in a factory. He had to quit his studies to support his widowed mother; his father and brother were casualties of the civil war. But this is not a sob story. He is lucky. Many 230 workers get paid US$50 a month. The Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers Democratic Union, which represents about 40,000 workers, is aiming for US$93 a month so employees can cover their basic living expenses. Textile production is the third largest source of foreign income in Cambodia. Well-known brands such as Gap, Benetton, Puma, and Adidas take advantage of the cheap, skilled (largely female) labor force. A few companies such as Wal-Mart and Nike have socially responsible policies, after harsh (and costly) public lessons learned, mainly through litigation; many do not. 255 Some workers have been threatened with physical assault if they go on strike. There have been a rash of mass fainting at factories. The real cause is yet undetermined. On Thursday August 25, 2011, 198 employees were hospitalized for fainting in an H&M factory in Kampong Chnang, a province an hour away from Phnom Penh. This is the second instance of fainting at this particular factory. Other mass fainting incidents have occurred at a Puma factory in July and August 2011, among other locales. After an inspection following a fainting outbreak on Tuesday August 23, 2011, M&V company representative Un Chhan Teak claimed that there was no connection between the mass fainting and working conditions. He said, “After one or two women collapsed, the others panicked and followed suit . . . We will allow them to stop working for two days.” 256 Perhaps these group faints are another form of protest since formal organizing is regularly met with violence. The International Labor Organization noted that such outbreaks of fainting spells were due to nutritional deficiencies. Workers cannot afford to feed themselves properly for the thirty cents an hour working forty eight hours a week. Cambodian Labour 231 Confederation president Ath Thorn stated that “inflation was eroding salaries and garment makers were forgoing meals and working overtime.” 257 Whateve the true cause, the workers are toiling for a pittance. And they still continue to sew. And Seckon continues to stitch together these stories. Tell me. Don’t you see, the past shapes the future? Welcome to the Kingdom of Wonder. …………… In the following segment I discuss another artist, Hồng-An Trương, who also deals with still-present pasts through patchwork techniques. Vietnamese American experimental video artist Hồng-An Trương uses archival images to challenge constructions of national and individual identity and colonial and post-colonial subjectivity. 232 Silence and Void, or Double Trouble: Hồng-An Trương’s Visual Archives The total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. –Franz Fanon As a viewer, I’m constantly looking for my family. For me, the process of going through the archives, there’s always the process of looking for family members and not seeing oneself there. –Hồng-An Trương 258 A forty-something tender-eyed friend tells me about constellations and his family, his parents who died during wartime. I imagine him as a child with the same eyes gazing with his mother and father at the night sky, orbs glowing. Darkness and light. As an exiled adult, he couldn’t bear to look heavenward in the dark, the memory of loss unbearable, a black void. He too is looking for his family, himself; they cannot be seen, found—they are forever lost in the dark. At night he dreams of gaping holes in the undone sky which he tries to suture together, the gaps immense. Hồng-An Trương’s artwork also stitches across the torn seams between memory and loss, desire and void. National and personal memory, historical trauma, and colonial desires are undone, briefly pulled together, but the absences stretch open, immense. In her works, the past is ever-present in archival black and white, darkness and light. So are the historical periods of Việt Nam, demarcated by the presence of Others—French colonialism, the American war: crisp white linen suits, somber Catholic tunics framed by white hands, white artillery sparks in a black sky. The legacy of Enlightenment and Cold War discourse upon “dark-skinned” people remains spectral, stereoscopic: carte postale 233 Paris, camouflage and colons. Dark jungles and wide white boulevards, black robes and white heat. For Trương, the process of locating oneself, dislocating the gaze of colonialism and the Hollywood machine is an ambivalent, spectral, spectacular, one, a process of endless deferral. Within the larger context of diasporic cultural production, I will discuss Hồng-An Trương’s 2010 solo exhibition at Duke University entitled The Past is a Distant Colony, which features a video-installation-object or video “sculpture,” Furniture to Aid in the Viewing of the Lover (2009) (1:44), and her video trilogy entitled Adaptation Fever (2006-07)—comprised of The Past is a Distant Colony (9:00), It's True Because it's Absurd (3:00), and Explosions in the Sky (Điên Biên Phu 1954) (3:00). Sporadic Diaspora For diasporic subjects, the gaps between official history and individual memory are immense. Personal narratives are often rendered invisible within public discourse, a mute void. But what constitutes history and memory, home and exile? The eternal process of looking and not seeing oneself reflected, refracted constitutes loss, liminality. Hồng-An Trương’s ongoing search to find traces of her family and herself within historical archives possibly points at melancholic mourning. As noted in an earlier chapter, Freud’s melancholic subject endlesslessly grieves her loss, revisiting the site of absence. 259 Writer and performance artist lê thi diem thúy also searched for a glints of recognition and familiarity in old postcards of Vietnamese colonial subjects, found in Parisian flea markets. These images of strangers reminded her of her family, of herself. Instead of mourning the archive, lê proclaims, “I thought of these images as my 234 inheritance.” 260 These artists’ liminal positions—as diasporic subjects living and working in between physical and psychic places and times—offers them a unique critical vantage point. In mining visual archives of black and white colonial postcards and grainy celluloid footage, nostalgic and horrific, Trương suggests that things are not so, well, black and white. Following current reformulations of diaspora that address many migrations rather than one-way conceptions of “home/ exile,” Hồng-An Trương’s palimpsest work notes that identity is not binaristic, highlighted by the “doubled” vision created by the split screen repetitions in some of her videos. This approach reflects an unexpected and vigorous multiplicity of movements, influences and identifications. Experimental video artists including Peter Fung, Patty Chang, Ming-Yuen S. Ma, Paul Wong, and Nguyễn Tân Hoàng and so on have used various strategies in their artwork to speak of the tensions of complex cultural negotiations and histories. 261 Coming of age in the shadow of 1990s multiculturalism, Trương makes work that destabilizes fixed notions of nation- hood and identitarian politics. The ghost of multiculturalism darkens “white cube” spaces in the form of exhibitions of carefully selected cultural representatives. While championed by art institutions as an artist of Vietnamese descent, Trương’s work is not about claiming a singular personal or national narrative, but the construction and blindspots of those narratives. She examines how subjects are varyingly constructed and interpellated through religious and state institutions. Speaking of Adaptation Fever, Trương states, 235 I was looking at Catholicism in terms of it being a very obvious and powerful process of colonization, and an irreversible part of the war. At what point does colonization become not objectifying. I was thinking about it in the context of politics and the wars, and Catholics who stayed in the North and what their sympathies are because we assume that all Catholics left and moved to the South. I wanted to break down what we think about Vietnamese politics and identity. (Võ 2009, italics mine) Adaptation Fever is informed by many migrations: colonial movements of laborers, clergy and colons (colonial settlers); the 1954 internal exodus of Vietnamese (largely from North to South Việt Nam) after France’s defeat and withdrawal from its former colonies; and more recent resettlements both internally and overseas. Currently, there are approximately three million overseas Vietnamese, which can be roughly divided into four groups. Prior to 1975, many Vietnamese settled in neighboring countries such as Laos, Cambodia and China. Vietnamese who settled in France as part of the legacies of colonialism also fall into this first grouping. The second– and largest–set consists of Vietnamese who left Viet Nam after 1975 as refugees to settle in North America, Australia (159,848–2006 census), and Western Europe. Of this group there are two wavesof immigrants. The first wave relocated after the Fall/ Liberation of Sài Gòn (April 30, 1975); the second wave emigrated as political refugees following 1977. 262 Hồng-An Trương’s family belongs to this second wave, as does my own. There’s always the process of looking… and not seeing oneself there. Our families, our own bodies, are rendered both invisible and hypervisible as stereotypical boat refugees, gangsters, model minorities within western mass media. Trương and I are part of the “1.5” generation of refugees and returnees, caught in between history, memory and uneven modernities. 236 As noted in the first chapter, diasporic artists such Đỉnh Q. Lê, Jun Nguyễn- Hatsushiba, and An-My Lê have challenged Việt Nam’s metonymic function within the western imagination—noteworthy only as a site of U.S. military intervention. 263 As these artists deal with the long shadow of the audio-visual carnage of the Việt Nam-American War and its current echoes, Trương’s elegantly elegiac, disquieting gaze focuses steadily instead on the “scopic regime” of French Indochina (Jay 1988). The counter-memories of the colonial era is disquietingly disremembered and dismembered, evoking other visual histories of decolonization and struggle such as The Battle of Algiers (1966). This “regime” of colonial narratives is cast in tragic relief against the carpet-bombed destiny awaiting Việt Nam. The future, now past, is ever- present. Au Bon Pain, or Nostalgia without Pain In the imagination of authors, auteurs, gourmands, and globetrotters, the term Indochine triggers Orientalist visions of disappearing verdant (neo-)colonial splendor— the good life on plantations and villas across Viêt Nam, Laos, Cambodia (Nguyễn 2009). This “Pearl of the Orient” past is evoked in chic dining establishments across several continents for today’s cosmopolitan consumers. Restaurants called Le Colonial and Indochine in Sydney, Singapore, and New York serve French bread and wine, Vietnamese crepes, and nước mắm with colonial ambience. Global franchises such as Louis Vuitton, Au Bon Pain (founded and headquartered in Boston, Massachussetts), and fashion megahouses including Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Dior, Lacroix, Gaultier and so on attest to the potency of the allure of French civility, a civilizing capacity gracious and 237 melancholic as it thrives amidst its own decay in distant jungles, distant Casbah labyrinths. In their essay “Nostalgia without Pain” Laura B. Kennedy and Mary Rose Williams looks at the packaging of tourism towards first-world Western foreigners in Việt Nam. They posit that although all tourist development must be state-sanctioned, the state has largely ceded the process of image-making to international developers who are hawking visions of pre-modern Edenic tours of rural areas as well as invoking a nostalgic French colonial past updated for the postmodern tastes at luxury hotels in urban areas in which locals are submissive servants. Communist revolutionary fervor has given way to capitalist French rebranding fever—Hôtel Metropole, Lê Royale, Hôtel de la Paix are a few of the many five-star places to indulge one’s neocolonial appetite in Southeast Asia. In another variant, the traumatic sites of the Việt Nam-American War catering to foreigners “trivialize it,” making the painful past manageable, digestible, consumable (Kennedy and Williams). If nostalgic Indochina pleases the culinary and cinematic palate, Trương’s appropriated, disjointed documentary footage—sometimes literally showing disjointed humans—questions this force-fed diet, this insatiable cannibalistic hunger. Carnal appetites are addressed in Trương’s Furniture to Aid in the Viewing of the Lover. In order to view the piece, one must bend forward and lay face down on a worn wooden table to peer through a peephole. One can see bits of bifurcated, lushly colored scenes. From this vantage, powerfully gazing through the hole below, vulnerably splayed from behind, one sees, framed in black widescreen format, fragments from Jean-Jacques 238 Annoud’s 1992 adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ semiautobiographical 1984 novel L’Amant (The Lover), the story of an illicit affair between an impoverished adolescent French girl and a rich Chinese playboy in 1930s Sài Gòn. In split-screen, the film’s narrative is distilled. The Chinese man picks up the French girl in his sleek chauffeur- driven sedan, close up on faces. A medium interior shot catches him timidly reaching for her hand in the vehicle. A steady exterior wide shot of the bustling Chinese quarter marks their arrival. On the left panel, a zooming shot of a large room in dusky late afternoon, their abstracted limbs sex-entangled as passerby cast shadows on wooden blinds. On the right panel, a medium interior sedan shot at night. The man, now self-possessed, grabs her hand as she looks forlornly at the bustling traffic. They do not speak. The only sound audible is of one’s body upon the table, one’s own breath. Silence and void. Figure 31: Hồng-An Trương, Furniture to Aid in the Viewing of the Lover installation view I am reminded of Marcel Duchamp’s site-specific installation Étant Donnés: 1. La Chute d'Eau, 2. Le Gaz d’Éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (now permanently installed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art). The father of conceptual art’s infamous last work—described recently by art critic Holland Carter as a “monument 239 to eros”—consists of a blockaded room, visible through slim peepholes in a large antique door. Instead of lying down, one must stand up to peer through the slivers. Looking through a hole, one sees trees and hills, a waterfall in the distance. In the foreground, a nude wax woman lies upon branches, her one arm raising a gas-lamp, her face obscured, her legs spread open revealing “oddly malformed genitals” (Carter 2009). In both Duchamp and Trương’s pieces, the climactic moment, so to speak, is of a nude white woman legs akimbo. The latter artist is keenly aware of its racial and gender politics. Other artists have also paid homage to Duchamp’s Étant Donnés. Notably, Simon Leung has linked Duchamp’s peephole voyeurism to the “glory hole”—a fixture of gay sexual practice in public bathrooms or “tearooms.” 264 Trương takes the voyeurism a step further. In order to achieve visual satisfaction, the viewer must bend across the wooden table to peer into the aperture, hence assuming the position for corporeal punishment across the backside—as if to receive the punishment the French schoolgirl evades—while simultaneously taking the passive, desirous posture of being penetrated from behind. Within the gallery space, the viewer simultaneously embodies the “penetrating gaze” and becomes a performer—seeing and seen. Mirror, Mirror The Past is a Distant Colony is formally striking in its symmetry—uncanny archival images of French-occupied Việt Nam play across from one another, mirroring each other, framed by black borders. Dealing with the formation of colonial subjects and their ambivalent subjectivity, the video features panning shots of benediction, mass, and ecstatic gestures and smiling faces at what seems to be political rallies or celebrations. A 240 few images repeat: two boys, barely beyond babyhood, awkwardly learning to cross themselves, one unsure, glances in slow-motion at the confident movements of his companion; a woman grieving, looking over her shoulder with an indeterminate expression hovering indefinitely between surprise and fear, a white-clad torso behind her; a rakish, elegantly suited Vietnamese man—perhaps anti-colonial leader and former Vietnamese prime minister Phạm Văn Đồng in his youthful prime—striding a cobbled, columned courtyard. As the video unspools, the scenes move from the colonial periphery to the metropolitan, radiatingcenter. There are kaleidoscopic shots of a teeming fin de siècle Paris. Boulevards, the Arc de Triomphe, and Benjamin’s arcades are interrupted, only briefly, by a burning Vietnamese village, and French lessons scrawled with white chalk on a blackboard, which evokes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s disjunctured dictation lessons in Dictee. The parade of black and white images flicker: Egyptian-themed musical spectacular, a graceful corpse lying in long grass, a glamorous closeup of chanteuse La Baker, decapitated Asian heads in baskets… This is the “frenzy of the visible”—modernity’s emphasis on visuality and conquest above all else (“to see is to conquer”) (Jay 1988). Trương mines the debris of Indochinese popular culture (postcards, lavish film productions, documentary footage) in similar ways that media artists Bruce Yonemoto and Patty Chang use the rubbish of American popular culture. Yonemoto appropriates the vernacular of mainstream movies and television (fifties Americana, eighties soap operas). Chang upends cultural and gender stereotypes through humor and parodic performance, inhabiting pop icons ranging from Bruce Lee and Anna Mae Wong to Chinese acrobats. 241 As well (art-)schooled (post?) postmodernists, all three use irony to various ends in their work. Trương’s ironic stance seethes below the surface. Chang’s and Yonemoto’s often playful work is at turns witty, wry, elegant and bombastic. However, Trương relies on serious, subtle understatement rather than mischievous overstatement to make her point. For Chang and Yonemoto, Walter Benjamin’s angel of history is a drag diva; for Trương he is a melancholic (perhaps with a dry, dark sense of humor), endlessly examining history’s wreckage, looking for loved ones, for oneself. The excesses of empire are revealed—things fall apart; the center cannot hold. 265 And so every image splinters from itself, peels apart precisely at the center, pulling away into indeterminately true mirroring doubles of itself. Even as the center fails, the object demonstrates its infinite reproducibility: but what do we do with endless “truths” beating like wings of the dark angel? Figure 32: Hồng-An Trương, The Past is a Distant Colony still 242 The “true” visual center of The Past is a Distant Colony —“a thin demilitarized zone between opposing images” as Việt Nguyễn describes it—is void. Moving images mirror each other on the periphery—East and West, North and South Việt Nam. Desire and void, darkness and light. The legacy of the “scopic regime” of Enlightenment rationality, a singular Cartesian worldview, with its overarching mono-focal vision of civilization’s grand vistas is disrupted, doubly troubled (Jay 1988). The verbal soundtrack for these disconcerting images are two women speaking intermittently in Vietnamese and in French, with the only subtitles briefly stating, “A nun talks about her suffering,” and “A woman talks about her childhood in French Viet Nam (Indochina).” They are not even subtitles, but spare indexes. In between the brief monologues is silence and void. The refusal to translate is important. Trinh T. Minh-ha has also dealt with the politics of translation, gender, representation and the nation-state in experimental films such as Surname Viet, Given Name Nam and theoretical texts including When the Moon Waxes Red. The voices of Minh-ha’s women (dis)embody multiplicity, remaining unplaceable, implacable: characters and voices shift onscreen. Minh-ha’s commentary about metanarratives, Derridean logos and the failures of language and representation is dealt with on a more intimate and direct manner in Trương’s video. Misrecognition, mistranslation is central in Trương’s work. The Past is a Distant Colony’s two female protagonists are disembodied voices; they never appear onscreen as they do in Minh-ha’s work. In overlapping narratives, the Vietnamese Catholic nun 243 speaks in a Northern accent about the fear of religious persecution, spiritual desire and religious ecstasy whereas the French woman speaks of sexual desire and ecstasy: Since I was I young girl I knew I wanted to help those in pain . . . I was a sad girl who always wanted something . . . I kissed the statue of the Virgin Mary in Sài Gòn . . . What do I want? The Virgin Mary is what I need . . . He stripped me naked, this is what I wanted . . . 266 Corporeality and spirituality, mind and body, Cartesian duality. Several scenes feature the 1954 exodus of Northern Vietnamese on barges to the South in hopes of escaping religious persecution. Shots of the wide sea, clouds and rafts visually echo the later exodus of boat people in the aftermath of the Việt Nam War. The French voiceover states, “We were lying in bed smoking cigarettes. We were caressing each other. The sea was motionless and quiet. The smoke was billowing ahead like small clouds . . . We parted in silence.” The irony is apparent only to those who understand French. This French text sounds vaguely familiar, perhaps culled from the sultry voiceovers of the film L’Amant (The Lover). Later, the same French female voice states, “I wanted to disappear in his gaze until I disappeared myself.” Desire and void. What possesses this woman, to enunciate with so much ennui, the careless demand implicit in colonialism’s totalizing gaze? The female voices reflect a double consciousness—a stereoscopic, stereophonic, perhaps schizophrenic subject. 267 The final sequence spoken in Vietnamese and subtitled faithfully into English reads, “What we are constantly moving towards/ but never quite reaching/ is some sense of union with the ultimate being,/ a constant revelation./Like looking in the mirror at someone who is me/ who is not me.” 268 This doubling, mirroring 244 speaks of how colonial and religious subjects are formed as well as the process of disidentification. Postcolonial theorist Franz Fanon has written about how the colonized mirror the actions and agendas of their colonizers. Yet the mimicry is imperfect, the mirror’s reflection refracted, distorted. In the mirror’s gaze, there is misrecognition. . . . the process of looking . . . but never seeing oneself there. For psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage is a crucial stage in establishing the formation of the ego, of distinguishing the imaginary from the Real. But what is real and what is fantasy in the colonial imagination? I am reminded of Foucault’s mirror, the symbolic space of absence and presence. Writing about the symbolic function of the mirror, Foucault observes that it is a space of absence and presence, both a utopic (imagined) and heterotopic (real) space. It is a liminal position in which one’s subjectivity is reflected upon, negated, and constructed. Describing his vantage point, Foucault writes, “I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent . . .” 269 When looking in a mirror, one sees oneself in a space which doesn’t exist, yet also sees their own own reality reflected. Foucault’s mirror is realized in cultural production and practices, a way of seeing oneself, reflected, refracted—a process of self-recognition and politicization. This space is both a reflection of reality and a site of fantasy and projection. It is finally a way of seeing oneself, a process of self-recognition. One is both object and subject of the gaze. Like looking in the mirror at someone who is me/ who is not me. 245 Truth or Dare It’s True Because it’s Absurd also features a disembodied female voice recounting a true story. The voice is a proxy for Hồng-An Trương’s mother, who once told her about a child playing with a gun. The child shoots his mother accidentally. The speaker says steadily, “I was standing there holding your hand. She was standing next to me holding a baby and the baby fell . . .” The background sound drones; in the distance, soldiers can be heard. The processed voice speaks in a measured cadence, belying the measured distance of recollection and its unreliability. The voice sounds like a ghost in the machine. In cultural representations including Western and Eastern film, literature, and visual art, the Vietnamese female body and psyche becomes the contested site of ideological tensions. Exemplars of the nation, Vietnamese women have been mythologized as tragic, long-suffering figures. For example, the legendary Trung sisters were 1 st century anti-Chinese resistance fighters who killed themselves after defeat.Việt Nam’s most famous work of literature is the 18 th century epic poem about a well- educated, beautiful woman named Kiều who sells herself to save her father and brother from prison. Then and now, women are often objects, not subjects. Postcolonial critic Panivong Norindr notes that the legacy of French colonial conceptions of Indochina, particularly Việt Nam as an “exotic and erotic” entity still lingers. 270 Trauma and desire. Mainstream contemporary cultural productions featuring American involvement in Việt Nam such as The Quiet American, Apocalypse Now, Miss Saigon, Heaven and Earth, among others allegorize Việt Nam as a female protagonist in need of salvation or as an 246 unyielding, mysterious, feminized landscape to be dominated. 271 In Hồng-An Trương’s work, Vietnamese womanhood is neither exotic nor erotic. The gaze is reversed, reflected. Trương’s women are not mute witnesses, victims of history or unwitting subjects. These women have agency, however circumscribed. Figure 33: Hồng-An Trương, It’s True Because it’s Absurd still It’s True Because it’s Absurd opens and closes with a black-and-white shot of a dirt road between rice fields. Soldiers hidden in the roadside foliage suddenly appear in a long column. The footage rewinds and they are again invisible in their cycle of camouflage. The viewer also sees planes dropping rations and close-up footage of urban streets during wartime—debris and dirt. Children stare vacantly with their packed possessions, their home vacated. A young man lays bloodied on the street. He is still alive, a woman crouches next to him. Smiling children play with a gun. Two identically dressed women stand in front of a political sign. One cannot tell exactly what year, what decade this is, only that it is wartime. Instead of literally mirroring and doubling images, the images are uncanny, full of doubles. Let’s revisit them: two parallel rows of soldiers, 247 visible then invisible; two children with their tongues sticking out playing stick-up; two women in white hats and outfits, their gaze blocked by sunglasses. “Do you remember?” the disintegrating voice asks again and again. This is the way memory works: it loops back upon itself, mental images replay, rewind, become distorted. She says, “I remember it later, afterwards . . .” Trương’s mother is the sole bearer of these memories, not the artist, not the woman who got shot by her child. All of the details have been forgotten; the documentary footage sutured together forms another recollection, both imagined and real. What is the truth and what is fiction? And do we dare unearth the “truth”? The initial site of shock and trauma is later reconstituted in memory, reconstructed verbally and visually. The forgotten past suddenly appears, like the anonymous soldiers once hidden in the spare cover along the straight road leading through the ricefields, a hiding place we did not even know could exist until the hidden reveals itself. Darkness and light. In Explosions in the Sky (Diên Biên Phu 1954), a black screen suddenly reveals white explosions, a French cannon positioned in the forest,shooting heavenward. The white blasts become strobe-like as the tempo of the soundtrack picks up, a Vietnamese cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 smash “Sounds of Silence.” The familiar, haunting melody and lyrics become unnerving. “Hello darkness my old friend . . .” Written as a song about youthful alienation, it was subsequently claimed by an American generation as an anti-Vietnam War anthem, although that was not the songwriter’s original aim (Kingston 69). For this flower generation’s Vietnamese counterparts, the song embodies the ambivalent legacy of the American War in Việt Nam—the smoky mental image of dimlit Sài Gòn bars blasting American songs, 248 American and Vietnamese soldiers memorialized by Hollywood war epics. The refrain echoes, “The vision that was planted in my brain still remains . . .” Trương’s use of popular culture—particularly music—has a more somber cadence and affect than Nguyễn Tan Hoang’s campy/poignant use of found footage and war-era songs sung by an exiled Khánh Ly or French love songs covered by Thanh Lan in videos such as PIRATED! and Forever Linda! The Vietnamese lyrics anonymously sung in Explosions in the Sky are not a direct translation of the original “Sounds of Silence”: “Tung người đi qua bóng tối đền/củng cầm tay đi với nhau . . . ” I imagine South Vietnamese soldiers—perhaps my then-fresh faced uncles who have since survived reeducation camps—half-lit by fire strumming this song in Vietnamese, their voices echoing in the dark. The half-life of longing and loss. “Hello darkness…” Their voices make me homesick, but I don’t know where home is. Perhaps homesickness is “the process of looking for family members and not seeing oneself there.” Their voices echo in the present, softly revebrating in compact suburban living rooms in Little Saigons all over the world. Their songs waft like incense smoke in the living room altars of memory.Their voices echo outwards, forwards to the grainy distant past, flashes of brilliance. Then void. The past, indeed, is a distant colony. The French lost the 1954 Battle of Diên Biên Phu to the Việt Minh, foretelling the demise of its colonial empire and the bifurcation of Việt Nam into North and South (Berndard 469). The dividing line of history and memory is blurred. The ever-present past is not represented by a barricade of images but by an abstract barrage of black and white— flickering ghosts. 249 Again we are looking at the night sky. Voices echo; desire and void. I cannot bear to look at Trương’s sky. I am heartbroken. The artillery fire—darkness and light—rends gaping holes in sky; it slow burns constellations in my mind’s eye. We suture what remains, the gaps immense. Figure 34: Hồng-An Trương, Explosions in the Sky (Diên Biên Phu 1954) still ____________ In the following section I would like to further elaborate on two themes which Hồng-An Trương and Leang Seckon both explore in their works: modernity’s representations and the archive. First, I discuss modernity’s representational shifts in space and time, which these artists capture through various artistic techniques of fragmentation. Secondly I talk about the artists’ different approaches to postcolonial collections by revisiting Derrida’s insights on the archive. 250 A Space of Time (or Love in the Time of Cholesterol) Trương and Seckon deal with the disjunctures of modernity and postcolonial subject hood through their use of disjointed narrative and images. They both comment on the costs and displacements of modernity. As I noted earlier, space and time is collapsed in their work to different ends. Seckon’s pastiche images point at the splintered nature of memory whereas Trương’s fragmentation speak about the gaps in official history. Postcolonial theorist Timothy Mitchell observes “the experience of modernity is constructed as a relationship between time and space” (13). He notes that a by-product of modernity is the spatialization of time. Although modernity is seen in historical time as a “stage,” a point of arrival within linear narratives of progress and development, it is actually a constant deferral, a staging of differences. Mitchell notes that it is “the very displacement of the West that enables modernity to be staged as ‘The West’” (24). Modernity, synonymous with Western manifest destiny, manifests itself in other locales as both different and similar. The West is displaced by the rest of the modernizing world but in its very displacement that allows the image ‘The West’ to propagate endlessly. Corporations such as the Gap, Nike, Coca-Cola largely associated with the West have largely shifted their operations to the global south. Off-shore production maximizes profits by taking advantage of a cheaper workforce. The displacement of the manufacturing process enables the modernization that comes with the relocation of these plants to developing countries to be staged as “The West.” In short, the “displacement” of corporate giants associated with The West to other regions allows for its proliferation. Signs of the (post-)modern appear as cholesterol-laden fast food restaurants and other 251 chain retailers in Southeast Asia. Kentucky Fried Chicken, dietary staple of the blue collar set in the United States, gets an upgrade in Cambodia and Việt Nam. A cool cosmopolitan teen and white collar adult hangout, fastfood outlets are chic signs of development and an emergent middle class. Along with Adidas, Mango, Louis Vuitton and other ubiquitous name brand storefronts, the West’s chain stores and attendant billboards are one of the visual indicators of that country’s “arrival.” Well, it’s about time. The timeline of development plays out in real space. What we think of as linear uni-dimensional time becomes intertwined with our experience of space. As Benedict Anderson suggests with “imagined communities,” members of a given culture are connected through a shared temporal narrative as well as affinity for a geographic space (“homeland”). Time and space (and community) cannot be separated. This builds upon Walter Benjamin and Henri Bergson’s earlier insights on “homogenous empty time,” time measured by the voids demarcated by the ticking clock, the grids of the calendar and the timetable. It is generic time, the daily hum drum. It is a psychic grid, a net of synchronized time ensnaring the globe. This sense of time makes strangers feel conjoined in space and time, a sense of simultaneity: they may not be aware of each other’s existence but they inhabit the same time in the same geographic spaces. This “homogenous empty time” may be represented by Trương’s teeming fin de siècle masses going to and fro, or her Vietnamese subjects repeating the same gestures again and again: the two Catholic boys crossing themselves, the suited man striding the courtyard, the soldiers doing military rehearsals. Tell me again and again. The routines of modernity are regulated through the clock, the calendar, the alphabet and the gridded 252 boulevards. Space and time become coterminous agents of bio-power. There is no way off the grid. The recurring grids in Seckon’s paintings also evoke the discipline that has been ingested, inculcated into the everyday. If one looks at a map of Phnom Penh, all the streets are gridded, thanks to the foresight of its French colonial city planners. In his paintings, the gridded fields and gardens become a lattice of destruction. It is the dead- end logic of modernity. Civilizing logic turns deadly. The timeline of linear progress, of domino theory gets played out in geopolitics. The insidious logic of homogenous empty time writ large upon a heterogeneous world demands violence as it aims to regulate and civilize. This empty time may also evoke the sense of “stuckness” Seckon describes before, during and after wartime. This sense of time and space simultaneously connects and alienates its subjects. In Translating Time Bliss Cua Lim discusses Bergson’s views on homogenous time as well as the postcolonial critique of ideas of progress and linear time. She observes that seemingly neutral modern global time—undergirded by imperialistic notions of teleological advancement and expansion—relegates “peripheral” geographies and subjects to a occupying a “past” time and space within the present moment. This is the comparative rhetoric of “developed” and “developing” countries. In short, universalizing homogenous time deals with heterogeneous localized views of time by deeming it as obsolete, backwards. Difference is domesticated through clock-time and time zones. Lim would advocate for Trương’s approach to cinema: the filmmaker reveals myriad temporalities which is coeval to, but chafes against, homogenous time. The time- space of memory and trauma is contained within modern global time—perhaps it is 253 exacerbated by it—but traumatic memory is a distinct temporal consciousness. Although traumatic memory is carried or relived and revisited in the present, it is often seen as a relic of the past. Trương reverses this equation: modern global homogenous time initiated by colonial conquest is represented by archival footage—images of the past. The past is a distant colony. The past is a distant colonizer. Traumatic memory seethes into the present; it is the present. In Trương’s videos the present is marked by absence. The global present is a particular form of time consciousness which Seckon and Trương question. The temporal consciousness expressed by their fragmentary approaches is one of heterogenous times and places. They proffer perspectives from multiple vantage points, not from a single location. Their subject positions are also multiply situated. The modern is experienced as contemporaneous existence. Although Seckon’s Salty Flower Skirt (Somphut Picar Ompul) is a present-day mapping of Cambodia, the traumas of history and development is indelibly inscribed on its landscape. Past, present and future merge. I have observed earlier that it represents a more cyclic, Buddhist view of time and space, the Wheel of Life—birth, death and rebirth cannot be separated. For Trương, the empire’s center and its peripheries cannot be separated. Although they occupy separate spaces, they are connected psychically, through military presence and through regulations. Another connection is implicitly drawn between the violence of the colonial past and current regimes. She also presents the viewer with an endless ring. Both artists defy conventions of linear time and narrative, proffering instead circles of association. 254 The difference between the pre-modern, the modern and postmodernity lie in their different approaches to representation. The modern is a rupture from the pre-modern, in a similar manner the postmodern is demarcated by its predecessor. In subsequent stages, we are increasingly removed from the “real” and originary. As post-moderns we live in a universe of signification, of eternal deferral. In a similar way, the West and its project of modernity is defined by its relation to the non-West. Yet the direction of source to copy moves in the opposite direction: the West of is the progenitor of modernity; its peripheries are duplicates with a difference. Such the-West-and-the-rest binaries have been questioned by thinkers such as Arjun Appadurai who advocate for models of exchange and overlap. The assumption that modernity is a Western model is dependent on the differences manifest in other locales, its discrepant histories and “discrepant modernities.” Again modernity is not a historical stage, but rather a staging (Mitchell 23). It is a staging of narratives of power and domination, of development and destruction. In different countries, the staging varies. Modernity is representation, an endless replica of itself, imperfect. Seckon shows us that during Cambodia’s “golden age,” the staging of the country’s modernity took on a particular valence in the wake of independence. It was rock and roll and sharp-edged modernist public structures and mod dress. It was Jacqueline Kennedy “fulfilling a lifelong dream of visiting Angkor Wat,” as a framed photograph at Le Royale Hotel in Phnom Penh declares proudly. Her arrival embodied the hope that Cambodia had arrived on the world stage. This staging was a vision of brave new world. It was Cambodia crafting a sleekly modern image of itself. Now, three decades later it is doing the same, picking up where history once paused and 255 returned to the year zero. Trương demonstrates that the groundwork for modernity was quite different in Việt Nam, although both countries answered to the same colonial master. She maintains that the brutal staging of Vietnamese modernity is revisited, reimaged. Việt Nam’s vicious colonial past is restaged as romantic period films—modern love unto death. Of course these stagings of modernity require an audience, spectators. It is double vision: the global audience and the (post-)colonial melancholic subject. Who are these visions of modern grandeur for? It is bifurcated vision: the past shapes the future; the image of the future is crafted as the antithesis of the past. The present is a blindspot, an open question. The oppressively elaborate colonial mansions, its pomp and circumstance of Corinthian columns is displaced by the clean, spare outlines of modernism’s angles. The psyche is split, doubled, a doubled consciousness. I see myself in the gaze of another. Trương’s mirroring points at this doubling. Mitchell notes that there is a “double difference” in modernity’s project: the first sites are “the displacements opened up by the different space” of the non-West. The doubled difference is “the ways in which this space is made to appear different” (29). So “Western” modernity demands multiple displacements, both physical and psychic. Modernity in developing countries depends on this divergence and dislocation—it is a “different” modernity from the West, but the ways in which this difference is legible hinges on the representation of a modern West. And God created man in His image. It is a double difference and a double bind. Trương and Seckon’s work are restagings as well. It retells the invisible stories of what happened, or what might have happened. Their projects depend on the almighty West as 256 instigator for the bifurcated narratives to play out. The West becomes another other, a mirror, or a mirror image. 257 Archive Fever Pitch Time and space is compressed, congealed within the archive. In this enclosed space, the past is unearthed in the present. Hồng-An Trương and Leang Seckon engage archives in different ways. Seckon is creating an artistic archive, a public statement culled from his personal collection of memories and mass media remnants. Trương uses archival footage to point at the gaps in national identity and representation. Derrida notes that the Greek etymology of the word archive entails both “commencement” and “commandment,” evoking authenticity and authority. The archives, or archons, of the Greek superior magistrates embody authority, but it is also concealed, sheltered. Hence the archives are visible as an authoritative site yet they also conceal authority. Reflecting on Freud as well as technology and memory in Archive Fever, Derrida muses that the interior psyche is reflected in external, public archives. Yet both are mere traces (Ketelaar 132). There is no inside or outside, only difference. The inner world of the mind and the archive of the outer physical world imperfectly mirror each other. The notion of authenticity is questioned. Again there is a doubling: the interior, invisible private realm of the psyche, site of hidden “truths” for psychoanalysts and the visible public collection, the site of “authentic” and originary data for archivists (Brothman 191). Both are flawed constructions. Just like his earlier insights on the inherent lack within language, Derrida notes that the archive—the site of the inscription of collective memory and official history—is imperfect. Derrida’s insights on the archive takes into account Freud’s pleasure principle and death drive, two conflicting motivating forces—eros and thanatos. The pleasure principle 258 is linked to an archive or conservation drive. In this capacity, “the archive affirms the past, present, and future; it preserves the records of the past and it embodies the promise of the present to the future” (Marloff 13). The death drive, in contrast, is “archive destroying” (Derrida 10). Not only does the death drive “incite forgetfulness, amnesia, the annihilation of memory,” it also forcefully propels the “eradication” of “ the archive, consignation, the documentary or monumental apparatus” (Derrida 11). The oscillation between remembering and forgetting, between eros and thanatos, are tensions Trương and Seckon mine in their work. Seckon fights against historical amnesia and cultures of indifference through his testimonials of collage and paint. His Heavy Skirt series is the promise of the present and the past to the future. Art and beauty survives. This is not to valorize his efforts at a commercial art space. The “autobiographical” series become a portable archive—a time capsule delivered to a different (if not parallel) universe. His archive is read as authentic, for he is “authentically” Cambodian, telling “true” stories from the deep recesses of his inner psyche. But as Derrida would point out, these attempts fail. It is all a mere trace. And Seckon knows this. His pieces cobble together what resembles autobiography (yes his poor mother had a single mended skirt) but stitches it into a larger myth about Cambodia, nationhood and survival. He cobbles together stories Cambodia tells itself about its golden past and stories that have been told about Cambodia’s traumatic past into a textured fable. It is a collective memory, not only an individual one. Memory is part reality, part mythology. Autobiography can encompass fact and fiction. I assert that Seckon is strategic when he claims he is only telling personal stories. This tactic serves a double function. It 259 gets him out of trouble from the Cambodian government; he does not make overt political critique. Secondly, as I’ve outlined earlier, his personal narrative is the “difference” the international art market craves: a Cambodian artist must speak his/her “local” experience of suffering and survival, of the double traumas of history and development. It is a double standard. The doubling continues: archive fever is the desire to preserve memory within a person (“to save”) but also the yearning for this information to be public (“to print out”) (Derrida 15). It is the fever to maintain cherished, perhaps secret knowledge for oneself, but it also the fever to share it with others. Instead of embodying an intimate personal archive, Trương works the other way around. Instead of presenting personal narrative, she overloads the viewer with national representations. Her aim is to deconstruct identity and nationhood, not to reconstruct it as Seckon does. Fever is both passion and symptom. You give me fever. For Trương, Indochine is both desire and illness: love unto death. The desire of colonial possession bears the trace of death and violence. Colonization encompasses both the pleasure principle and the death drive. It is both eros and thanatos. The colonial archive is writ large upon its subject’s psyche and bodies. In a sense the colonies are the archive: the public manifestation of an interior drive. It is the warehouse, the suppository of its master’s innermost desires. In the creation of its own colonial vision and archives, the center attempts to eradicate peripheral history and memory. In Trương’s use of mirror images, she comments that the inner and outer worlds have no real bearings. Where is the inside and where is the outside? There is no center, no periphery. They are mutually constitutive. The external institutions of discipline penetrate 260 the interior psyche. The truth-claims of the state competes with the will to truth of its subjects. 272 This is the “archival violence” Derrida speaks of—the omissions and repetitions. The collapse of memory—the impulse of the death drive—are the prerequisites of the archive: “the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory” ( Derrida14). Memory and history falters; the archive aims to take its place. As Trương demonstrates, the interior colony of the mind is where things break down. Her endless loops, her breakdown of narrative and images all point to the effects of archival violence. There is no cohesive memory, no coherent identity. Every master knows, you break them down to build them up. Epistemic breakdowns occur in multiple locations. Writing about the possibilities and limits of postcolonial archives, Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy state, “archival violence occurs within the purview of colonialist power/knowledge, but it also occurs ‘at the home’ of the archons—or as Derrida would emphasize, “there” in the liminal space where the law meets writing” (36). The letter of the law is written, inscribed on colonial bodies and minds. This is where the liminal archive, the colony, reveals itself to be the place of both “commencement” and “commandment,” simultaneously a beginning and a mandate. The rule of the law starts here. Imperial decrees are instituted, tested, revised here. In the beginning there was the Word... Archive Fever was first presented as a lecture near the dawn of the internet age in 1994, two years after the phrase “surfing the the internet” was coined and four years before Google search engine was launched. 273 The analogy of “saving” virtual files (input) or “printing” them as documents (output) is still apt. To imprint, to inscribe are 261 related processes. For Freud, what individuals inscribe or make public is really a screen for another, more private scene of authentic “writing.” Of course Derrida would challenge the lines between authentic and false, inside and outside, original and copy (Brotham 190-91). “Writing” and its corollary, witnessing, are faulty processes. While Seckon inscribes his story, half-hinting at an a priori scene of authentic reflection, Trương comments on the process of inscription itself through her faulty and incomplete translation s of L’Amant and other cinematic and literary texts. While the former artist “saves” and safeguards memory through internal processes, the later artist looks at the residual collective “printed” output. Some of her sources material is literally “printed”: the aging analogue films she works with, as well as the photographic prints. Both media—film and photography—has shifted from the analog to the digital realms. The very materiality of the archival films and photographs—now perhaps digitally re- mastered and stored in a virtual database—contributes to a mournful sense of nostalgia and distance in her work. Her uncanny experimental videos, digitally edited, evoke the look and feel of film. A work of art in the age of digital reproduction, their elegiac aura captures a sense of loss and bewilderment: the demise of empire, the demise of analog technologies. The modern shifts to the postmodern. I will not delve into this further as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes have written famously and extensively about the pathos inherent in photography. A twilight art captures the twilight empire, now vanished but not without traces. “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously observed. Echoing this claim, Derrida notes that technology defines the archive. The technology of 262 “archivization” shapes the very memory and history that is to be stored. In another of twist of inside/ outside categories, he also states that the structure of the archive determines the archive. The outer configuration of the collection determines what goes into it. Technology is the archive: “archivization produces as much as it records the event ” (23). For instance, documentary images often constitute the event for the global community who often do not experience it firsthand. The atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime is constructed by its artifacts. Nhem Em, the photographer who took thousands of infamous black and white of Tuol Sleng prisoners, stated the world had him to thank for leaving a trace, or else the world would not know anything ever happened. 274 The Việt Nam War was fought not only in the jungle, but on the television screens and newspapers of the United Nations. It was the first televised war, a war of representation. Traumas are rendered legible, digestible through its representations. If the medium is the message, what are Trương and Seckon’s messages via their chosen media? The very materiality or immateriality (in Trương’s case) defines in part what kind of audience that will view this work. Trương’s video installations are ephemeral, seen as film screenings or installed in institutional or gallery spaces. They do not go well with your living room couch. These experimental videos have cultural cache as avant-garde pieces with a limited audience. Trương plays the game of high conceptual art, eschewing any pretense of commercial gallery sales. The medium of video installation is about an engagement with time, space and narrative (or lack thereof). Her work deals with the ghosts of history and modernity, so the spectral nature of the flickering image is apropos. She assaults us aurally and visually, and also deftly conjures 263 up the echoes (haunting songs and voices) of the past. Trương knows technology constitutes the archive. The series is called Adaptation Fever after all, perhaps a sly nod and wink to Archive Fever. Speaking about her thought process in relation to the archive and artistic media, Trương states, I just think in moving images, I am thinking in time-based images. I think electronically! In both sound and image— I am always thinking of movement. Part of it is because I am drawn to the archive, the digital archive, the photographic and filmic archive, and so I am just working in the medium in which I find my source material (Trương 2010). The trilogy is about the technologies of bio-power: the bombs, propaganda, and the letter of the law. The frenzy of the visible is at a fever pitch. In playing with different representational technologies—photographs, carte postale, film, video, she remarks on the way histories and memories are constituted. The subjects and content produced by propaganda film is very different from the subjectivity recorded by the videocamera. Carte postale images of the colonies are for the cosmopolitan eyes of the colonizers. Family photographs present an entirely different archive, a different history. What is produced and what is recorded, and by what technologies? Through technologies of discipline, citizen-subjects are produced, documented, mapped, and catalogued by the state. Seckon, who has worked with performance and large-scale sculptural community- based installation, chose to work with paper, canvas and paint. His choice to make large scale paintings and smaller collages make his work very collectible for international art connoisseurs. Seckon’s two-dimensional still images do not engage the viewer the same way video does. Although the Heavy Skirt series presents narrative, the nature of the 264 medium renders it silent. The touch of the artist’s hand and his signature lines mark the work as “authentic.” It is hand-crafted, “folksy,” raw. These works are rough-hewn; they do not have the pristine billboard polish of a Jeff Wall painting. The imperfect lines, scribbles and torn edges deliver the message of poverty and pride. 265 (The Night Sky) Conclusion Though the lines between inside and outside are blurred, the archive must eventually be located in the public realm. Derrida observes that an archive’s existence depends on its “consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, of reproduction, or of reimpression” (12, italics mine). Art is an archive and artists are public intellectuals. Artists embody authority concealed and revealed. Do these two artists’ archives belie a melancholic sensibility? Trương’s archive reproduces reproductions, an endless repetition. She looks at archival footage again and again, hoping to see a glimmer of recognition which cannot be found. An endless grief for the lost object, her family. Although I proclaimed earlier that Seckon was no melancholic since he urged us to “get on with life,” perhaps he himself is in denial. His repetitive gestures of sewing, patching, and revisiting the past shows that the mourning process isn’t quite finished yet. If the baleful contemporary landscape of Salty Skirt is any indication, the country hasn’t successfully mourned or healed from its wounds either. But to view their archives through the lens of the pleasure principle, a perspective which “affirms the past, present, and future,” opens up new possibilities for engagement. The archive does not have to be “stuck” (to use Seckon’s term) in meaningless repetition and reproduction. The nature of archives have radically shifted since the archons. Art is an archive and a malleable one at that. __________ Again we are left with holes in Trương’s night sky and blooming wounds on Seckon’s canvases. Through this meandering chapter, I have highlighted strategies these 266 two emerging artists use to speak of the voids in memory and history, the gaps between individual identity and nationhood. Their very different approaches to fragments and fragmentation address the spatial and temporal contradictions of modernizing projects. Although Trương and Seckon constantly return to sites of trauma, they are not melancholics. Their return to personal and historical archives indicates archive fever. It is both symptom and desire. It is both the death drive and the pleasure principle. It is love unto death. The frenzy of the visible. It is a fever pitch. In the mind’s eye still the planes hover and the bombs burst. Oh the devastating beauty. Everywhere these blooms bleed. 267 Chapter Bibliography Walter, Benjamin. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1978. Brothman, Brien. [Review of] “Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever”, Archivaria 43 (1996) 191–192. Ottawa: Association of Canadian Archivists, 1996. Brown, Kay. “The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The 1970s, New York.” International Review of African American Art. Vol. 15, no 1, 1998 (45-52). Carter, Holland. “Landscape of Eros, Through the Peephole,” Art Review, The New York Times. August 27, 2009. 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Lê, the Vietnam War, Photography and Memory.” Art Journal 60, no. 1, Summer 20001. Berkeley: College Art Association Publications, 2001. Roth, Moira. “Traveling Companions/ Fractured Worlds,” Art Journal. Berkeley: College Art Association Publications, 1999. Ketelaar, Eric. “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives.” Archival Science 1. Netherlands: Kluwer Academci Publishers, 2000. 131-141. Trinh T. Minh-ha. When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics, 81-105. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. ———. Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989. Trương, Hồng-An and elin o'Hara Slavick. “War, Memory, the Artist and The Politics of Language.” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Newsletter 31, Item 2, 2010, August 2, 2010. Online: http://japanfocus.org/-Hong_An-Truong/3393. Trungpa Chogyam. The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1976. Yonemoto, Bruce. www.bruceyonemoto.net Võ Hồng Chương-Đài. Interview with Hồng-An Trương by Võ Hồng Chương-Đài. 2009. Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network online publication: dvanonline.org 270 Chapter Four Town and Country: Sopheap Pich and Phan Quang’s Urban-Rural Developments Taking the six-hour Mekong Express bus from Phnom Penh to Sài Gòn and back, after dozing off I sometimes I lose track of whether I am in the Cambodian or Vietnamese countryside. The expanses of green meld. Similar figures drive their motorbikes or cars through the dust, through grey paved roads. Occasionally on the air- conditioned bus a sun-scorched barang tourist (or three) sports the ubiquitous shirt sold in both countries emblazoned with the cringe-inducing truism, “same same but different.” In Phnom Penh some of the neighborhoods remind me of Sài Gòn: the same stainless steel metalwork, the same pastel multi-story architecture. And in my neighborhood near Wat Mohamontrey and Tuol Sleng prison—first “discovered” by the Vietnamese then used as propaganda, as I discussed in the previous chapter—I hear the same Vietnamese voices echoing through the side alleys. I am delighted and slightly incredulous when any given street vendor thinks I am a Khmer “local.” Despite a long history of ethnic tension, Vietnamese are the second largest ethnic group in Cambodia, followed by Chinese; I am both Vietnamese and Chinese. Still I stubbornly try to pass as a “local” in both Việt Nam and Cambodia to varying degrees of success. I am daily dumbfounded by the similarities and differences between the two developing neighboring countries. Same same but different. Cambodia and Việt Nam have a long history dating back thousands of years. Cambodia’s powerful past includes the Hindu state of Funan and later the fabled Kingdom of Angkor. At its twelfth-century zenith, the Khmer empire encompassed Việt 271 Nam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar, among other territories. In the seventeenth century, Việt Nam annexed an area of the Mekong River and continued to expand. As Viêt Nam and Siam (Thailand) grew in strength, Cambodia increasingly lost territory and power (Chandler 12-39). By the nineteenth century Cambodia was brought to the brink of dissolution by Vietnamese and Thai dynasties. Cambodia repeatedly sought French assistance, becoming a protectorate in 1864. Within twenty years, Cambodia was practically a colony. In 1887 Cambodia joined the Union of French Indochina with Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina (North, Central and South Việt Nam, respectively); Laos joined after the Franco-Siam War in 1893 (U.S. Department of State). 275 To this day heated border disputes continue with Việt Nam and Thailand. Cambodia opposition party ruler Sam Rainsy has continued to rail against Vietnamese border encroachments of Cambodian territory. Cambodia is also known as Kampuchea ( ក្ ពុជា ). Southern Việt Nam (née Cochinchina) is still often referred in the Khmer press as Kampuchea Krom (Southern Cambodia) because Sài Gòn and its vicinity was once Cambodia. Human Rights Watch has noted abuse of Khmer Krom, ethnic Khmer who live in Việt Nam, by both Vietnamese and Cambodian governments. Regarded as Cambodian in Việt Nam, they have no religious or land rights. For Khmer Krom political refugees in Cambodia, they are seen ethnic Vietnamese by Cambodians and are one “most disenfranchised groups” in the country, facing “social and economic discrimination and unnecessary hurdles to legalizing their status” (Human Rights Watch). Their case is just one example of the vexed love-hate contemporary relations between Cambodia and Việt Nam. Interestingly, Việt Nam—in its capacity as 2010 ASEAN 272 chair—has been called upon by Cambodian Minister of Foreign Affairs Hor Namhong to prevent “large-scale armed conflict” over the border between Cambodia and Thailand. 276 Despite this rocky relationship, Viêt Nam is still considered an important ally by Cambodia. In 2010 Viêt Nam plans to invest a staggering two billion dollars into infrastructural development, according to the Việt Nam News Agency. 277 Another truism: no money, no honey. It’s the same old game, with different stakes. Same same but different. This final chapter deals with urban-rural development for economic return in Cambodia and Việt Nam through the work of Phnom Penh-based sculptor Sopheap Pich and Sài Gòn-based conceptual artist Phan Quang. I first discuss Pich’s takes on the twin traumas of history and development, particularly Boeung Kak Lake, for two recent international shows. The use of narrative components, a more recent development in his practice, is a strategy I question. I then discuss economic and political relations between Việt Nam and Cambodia in order to provide context for these artists’ interventions. Third, I analyze Phan’s “translations” of rural Vietnamese subjectivity. Governmental land-grabbing and lump-sum payments for citizens to resettle illustrate some pitfalls of rapid growth. Pich and Phan grapple with the urban and rural upheavals caused by rapid infrastructural change. I assert that Pich’s and Phan’s translation of these issues for an international audience are (self-) exploitative gestures. By briefly revisiting Đỉnh Q. Lê’s earlier work on Agent Orange, I continue to look at problems affecting rural life as well as the politics of representation. All three artists make work tied to geographic locale, a strategic move which has benefits and drawbacks I discuss in the chapter. I conclude by 273 reconsidering the frameworks by which the traumas of modernity is represented, both creatively and critically. 274 Pich’s Forks in the Road Years after Sopheap Pich first moved back to Phnom Penh in 2002, he still embodied the stereotype of a “struggling artist,” sleeping on a cot in a cramped room built inside his studio space in the low-rent Boeung Kak area. How did Pich end up “returning” to Cambodia? Pich was born in 1971 in rural Koh Kralaw, in Battambang province, about five hour drive from Phnom Penh, located in northwestern Cambodia. During the Khmer Rouge period, his family was displaced. He states that his family shuttled “to different towns and villages in the province” (Pich). This traumatic journey will be become the subject of a body of work I will discuss in the second half of this essay. They ended up in a refugee camp in Thailand, like my own family. In 1984 Pich’s family settled in Massachusetts, where a significant number of Cambodian refugees landed. He attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, changing from pre-med to painting against his father’s wishes. His father wanted him to have a stable life and income and become a medical doctor. Pich eventually earned an MFA from School of the Art Institute Chicago and made his way back to his homeland. In the early years of the new millennium, the prodigal son seemed to embody his father’s grim predictions. Although Pich no longer sleeps on the ground, he still has his well-worn studio where he employs craftsmen, Tomai and Sophai, to help make his labor-intensive sculptures. It took Pich a while to find his way, to find his artistic voice. Trained as a painter, he had several solo painting exhibitions in Phnom Penh. His artistic “breakthrough” came in 2004 when he made his first sculpture, made of rattan, bamboo and metal wire, for a group exhibition at the Centre Culturel Français. He felt limited by 275 painting, that the local community couldn’t relate to it, that he was too preoccupied “with making an image on a limited space” (Pich). Now the two-dimensional lines of his paintings projects onto three-dimensional space. Pich’s signature bamboo and rattan strips form lines, grids. His sculptures cast a net of shadows on the wall; the lines go on seemingly endlessly. The bamboo, rattan and metal wire is the “common language” of household objects in Cambodia: from these basic units, baskets, furniture, brooms and other daily utilitarian items are constructed. Everywhere one can see bamboo and rattan stitched together with metal wire, in the markets of Phnom Penh, in Pich’s rural rice- farming community of Koh Kralaw. These materials speak of embodied memory, of the comfort of home. Now these simple materials, materials he played with as a child in the countryside, are the main vocabulary of his practice. Pich employs these “local” materials in an updated manner for his contemporary art practice. Đỉnh Q. Lê, another diasporic artist who has also moved for the long-term to Southeast Asia, has also risen to prominence on the international art stage for using updating “native” mediums. In the case of Lê (whom I have discussed briefly in the first chapter), uses a “traditional” grass-matt weaving technique he learned from his aunt for his “photo-weavings.” Lê’s practice encompasses other media, most currently video installation, but he first built his career on these weavings and was worried at one point about being “typecast.” 278 Lê and Pich are among the names most synonymous with Vietnamese and Cambodian contemporary art. Perhaps I am stretching the parallel a bit. I may be overly reductionist but I wonder if their choice of “essentializing” media-with-a- 276 twist has anything to do with this visibility. Is the medium the message? What is it saying? In a competitive art market, formal innovations such as the consistent use of bamboo, rattan and metal or weaving helps make an artist’s output memorable to the larger public. When that artist is associated with a developing country, the formal and conceptual links are further cemented. For instance, “she lives in Việt Nam and makes postmodern lacquer paintings.” This becomes an easy sell, an easy relationship for collectors and curators to remember. Diasporc artist Phi Phi Oanh Nguyễn does work in lacquer and resided in Hà Nội for a period of time, but now has moved to Latin America. She has not received the same level of recognition that Lê and Pich have, but perhaps there are gendered power dynamics at play. Pich’s use and “return” to the materials of his motherland, of his childhood is compelling. The medium (re-)connects the returnee artist to his to his roots. Pich’s frustration that contemporary painting is a medium laypeople in Cambodia couldn’t relate to is valid. Painting has a different philosophical history, it has different cultural, political and art historical references. Painting for painting’s sake as Clement Greenberg famously advocated and championed through the works of Jackson Pollack represents a very particular moment of American post-war might, although its practitioners and theorists would deny it. Art is political. It reflects a given socio-cultural vantage point, no matter how apolitical it claims to be. The medium is the message. So Pich’s return to these humble materials has political and aesthetic dimensions. Lê’s appropriation and innovation of a weaving technique used by Vietnamese villagers is a smart move: it combines tradition and modernity. The Southeast Asian artist, both local 277 and diasporic, is a representative for her or his country, a burden other artists invariably carry. Yes Lê and Pich have flexible citizenship as globe-trotting art stars but they are not truly cosmopolitan in the art world. Their work is often reduced to a local context. A 2007 Frieze magazine article by Brian Curtin proclaims, “Expectations of Sopheap Pich’s first solo show in Bangkok were high . . . Of course the interest in the artist probably extends more generally to the burgeoning Cambodian art scene.” This statement partly reveals that the artist and his country of origin are being conflated. Pich is an ambassador for Cambodian contemporary art, a privilege and a burden. Frieze magazine, based in London, is a high-gloss, high-powered artsy fartsy magazine firmly rooted in the center (psychically if not physically) of the still-Eurocentric art world with short spotlight articles about its periphery. It claims to be “the leading” rag about contemporary art and culture. If Pich were showing the same work as a resident of say, Lowell, Massachusetts, he would not get the same level of international or even national attention. Pich would be a representative of the Cambodian American community, a small minority within a large nation, not the artistic heir of an entire country. The article further observes that Pich’s work “evokes local contexts through their materials and ostensible concerns but could never . . . be reducible to local contexts because of their methods” (Curtin, italics mine). The discussion of formal technique reveals the artist’s (or the reviewer’s) ambivalence. Pich’s method is similar to the method of certain chain restaurants in Cambodia and Việt Nam: provide “local” flavor with a modern twist and upscale wrapping. Think Phở 24. But it is more complex, it is not such a simple formula. Pich addresses both local and international audiences in his 278 work, audiences with expectations of what art should be. Pich’s methodology is more open-ended than simply referencing local context, evoking local flavor. Elaborating on Pich’s chosen medium, Curtin states, “At the level of form, rattan as a signifier of vernacular or indigenous craft is very much resisted and the near minimalism fits expectations of contemporary art very well.” I disagree with this assessment which pitches “craft” against high art. Minimalism was marketed in its heyday as the ultimate “apolitical” art movement. In the article, the universalist expectations of minimalism is contrasted with the local, politicized specificity of indigenous craft. Although Pich does not create “precious” objects—cute oversize rattan baskets per se—his potency as an artist lies in straddling craft and high art. Don’t forget craftsmen create his work using the same techniques for making rattan tables and chairs. Yes, Pich resists simple references. His intervention is largely a formal one: taking the “vernacular” of rattan and transforming it. While his work is formally stunning and can be appreciated on its geometry and undulating lines, his conceptual engagement does not follow minimalism’s philosophical lineage. Beauty is a strategy. Identity can be a trap. Where is the trapdoor to escape? Curtin concludes the review, “To the extent that Cambodia provides his inspiration one can only hope he never becomes trapped by the country he is working out of.” No one would write a thing of Jasper John’s seminal encaustic interpretations of the American flag. John’s caustic takes on mid-century America did not limit his career. It’s like writing Andy Warhol is “trapped” by America and its celebrity culture—that Warhol is one trick pony. Cambodia’s vast landscape and vast issues is viewed by this bloke reviewer as too small 279 a terrain. But maybe he has a point—Pich’s formula is too simple. Pich can be “trapped” by the country he is working out of, especially if he wants to be an international artist whose artistic terrain is not limited by identity. But the country and the located topics which are trapping him is what is giving him legibility. It’s a double edged sword. Like his Vietnamese American counterparts, he is called to represent his homeland but must find a way to maneuver the constraints of identity politics. As Curtin points out, Pich may fall prey to making work peddling in easy symbolism for local issues. Curtin warns, “An engagement on this level would quickly run dry.” The reviewer and the artist’s uneasy relationship to Cambodia and contemporary art are revealed. For Pich, the uneasiness comes from simple categories others place upon him—craft/ high art; local/ global. The uneasiness also comes from the resistance against “local” references but being dependent upon them for an artistic identity. For the reviewer, the uneasiness also comes from too many expectations. In Curtin’s limited view, local and “international” vantage points are at odds. This kind of thinking is a trap. This “trap” doesn’t just belong to expat reviewers. Cambodia also calls upon Pich to be its standard bearer, its cultural ambassador. Pich, along with two other artists, Chath Piersath and Marine Ky, are highlighted in Cambodia’s Cultural Profile as being exemplary returnees, bearers of the cultural torch. Cambodia’s Cultural Profile is developed by the country’s Ministry of Fine Arts with assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation. It serves as an e-resource for “cultural professionals and the general public,” a sort of diplomatic e-gateway. 279 Pich doesn’t care much about the hype. Most days he 280 can be found with his assistants in the studio, the lake’s cool breeze providing respite from the heat. Leang Seckon, a good friend, is a studio neighbor. Pich now lives in an apartment near the dignified peaked roof outline of the National Museum. A sign of his success, Pich also rents another “studio”: a relatively unfurnished, airy three story house a door down which he uses to store and display his large-scale sculptural work. All three studios are perched on the edge of the green-tinged lake. On a September 2010 visit to his new studio space, Sopheap and I take a break on the second story balcony which has clear views across the 222 acre (90 hectare) lake to the other side of town. He points out recent construction including the sci-fi looking pyramid-within-a-cutout-square structure which houses the Ministry of Defense. Closer are dilapidated wooden shacks. Joking about his days of sleeping virtually on the floor, we say, “The view’s nicer up here.” “It’s pretty here,” Pich agrees. Surveying the lake’s confetti of unidentifiable rubbish, plastic bottles bobbing like miniature buoys and silvery snack bags glimmering like dead carp, he sighs, “but don’t look to close.” Soon the scenic, polluted lake may be gone; it is being filled in with sand. Pich’s first solo exhibition in New York at Tyler Rollins in 2010, entitled The Pulse Within, specifically deals with the controversial development of Boeung Kak Lake and the price of Cambodia’s growth in general. As the title of the exhibition implies, things are very different beneath the surface. After the defeat of the Khmer Rouge, many returned to Phnom Penh in the 1980s to start again after years of uncertainty. Squatters and refugees settled in Boeung Kak 281 Lake, an unwanted area, subsisting off of the lake and erecting shacks on stilts—brown water fowl balancing their bodies on spindly legs (Gluckman). Today signs of its impoverished roots remain, yet the area is also surrounded by small business, embassies (the grand French embassy flanks it), a mosque and a bargain-basement backpacker’s area. Today most of the area’s homes still hover over the water, built on planks. Most of the settlers have rights to their land under Cambodia’s 2001 Land Law (Khmer Machas Srok). More than 4,000 families living around the Boeung Kak area face forcible eviction. In total 20,000 people are affected. 1,000 undercompensated families have already moved without being notified of their rights. In August 2008 the lake started being filled in; families in the affected area were harassed to move. $8,000US was offered by the developers for each family if they agreed to relocate within a given timeline. The sand filling the lake caused structural damage and flooding to the surrounding homes, adding further stress on the residents to move (World Bank). Cambodian newspaper Khmer Machas Srok proclaimed that “Some citizens did not want to suffer violence from the authorities and decided to leave with tears.” 280 In September 2009, the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) with Cambodian housing rights groups filed a formal complaint against the World Bank for the Bank-funded land tilting project, according to the Bank Information Center, a “watchdog” group for the World Bank. The World Bank responded a month later stating that it would do a full-scale investigation, which commenced in November 16-19, 2010. 281 Its recommendations may be useless since the Cambodian government has already refused to cooperate with the World Bank since September 2009, after a 282 disagreement over social safeguards—the Policy on Involuntary Resettlement instituted by the Bank (Pred). Although the development of the lake and its surrounding area has only sparked recent outrage, the project has been brewing for several years. Even though the Bank is called to intervene, it is implicated. 282 In 2007, the titling team from the World Bank- financed Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP) adjudicated and denied the area’s residents title en masse, despite the 2001 Land Law (Bank Information Center). According to the formal complaint filed by COHRE and other development NGOs, the World Bank “breached its own operational policies” by not adequately monitoring the Land Management and Administration Project. 283 The World Bank’s mission is to “fight poverty with passion,” 284 not exacerbate it. Ironically, as developing countries such as Cambodia increase their GDP, the poor become further marginalized. On February 6, 2007 the Municipality of Phnom Penh (MPP) announced a 99-year lease agreement with a local private developer, Shukaku Inc. for the development of the 329 acres (133 hectares) of the Boeung Kak lake area, including the 222 acres of lake. Shukaku is run by Lao Meng Khin, a senator “and major donor” of the ruling Cambodia People’s Party. He is also director of the logging company Pheapimex (Pred). Some families in the area have been notified of the development of Boeung Kak, others have not heard a thing. Leang Seckon has not been contacted; what he hears are from international news sources. There is fear in the air. In October 2010 Seckon moved all of his artwork from his working studio/ family home in Boeng Kok to his house in the center of the city. “Anything could happen at any time, he is very concerned. Some people have lost 283 everything,” a mutual friend mentions. 285 Another female artist whose family resided in the area was notified and offered compensation. “Some closer to the development on the other side of the lake were contacted,” she recalls. “My family move but I come back.” She is using her former family home as a live/ work studio space. She continues, “Others know nothing. But you can see the change. Everyday more and more families move out because they are scared.” 286 The area is shrouded with anxiety. Figure 35: Sopheap Pich, Raft, 2009, bamboo, rattan, wood, wire, metal bolts 226 x 450 x 132 cm (89 x 177 x 52 in.), Site-specific installation Pich’s towering sculpture Raft (89 X 177 X 52 inches), a grid of bamboo and rattan strips, addresses this situation. Evoking the homes-on-stilts of the lake, this piece is a rectangular building perched on two elongated cylinders—a pontoon-like structure. The edifice recalls the new constructions going up throughout Phnom Penh, the impossible stacks of boxes perched precariously on top of motorbikes zooming through town to deliver their cargo, as well as carts filled to the brim with items for recycling. Speaking 284 of these carts, Pich writes, “On the Thai-Cambodian border, carts and tricycles filled with all kinds of scrap materials are pushed and pulled by handicapped people every day to sell to Thai factories.” Many living on the border make their livelihood by the recycling debris of the past—mines, shells, unexploded bombs. In recycling these materials, some become injured or die trying to dissemble mines or bombs. The metal wire which Pich uses to fasten his bamboo and rattan strips together is also culled from unexploded bombs and casings. Material is laden with meaning: “Now, when I see the new high rises and shiny buildings being constructed, I can’t help but think about what the materials were. And when I see the workers building the buildings, it is as though I’m looking at the same people who scavenge for metals.” The refuse of the past is being refashioned. Blood, sweat and steel. For the artist, development is not a godsend. It’s a Trojan horse. One can see this “raft” and its high-rise cargo on the river—a foreboding vision of development. The “shiny” buildings, the golden miles, are all being transported on this raft across the lake, across the rivers that bisect Phnom Penh, across the River Styx. The cubical form of the crisscrossing structure also brings to mind small tombs. The stark formality of the square boxes evokes Turner-prize winning British sculptor Rachel Whiteread’s inverted casts of interiors. Her first significant piece, 1990’s Ghost, is the cast of the entire living room of a Victorian house. The off-white form looks like a mausoleum. The “negative” space, the void between walls and floors is filled; emptiness becomes solid, absence becomes presence. In the opposite manner, Pich’s forms are not solid at all. They are open grids, lines made of organic materials. The bamboo and rattan forms a lattice, a skeletal structure, an X-ray, a blue print line drawing in three 285 dimensions. The cylindrical vessels which support the mausoleum-like “building” also look like missiles or bombs, bringing to mind the horrific past. In this piece the past and present converge. As I look at the piece and muse about the title, I think of my own traumatic history, escaping Southeast Asia on a raft, ending up in a refugee camp in Thailand, presaging Pich’s own arrival by three years. The past repeats itself. The displacement of thousands by the Khmer Rouge is echoed by today’s forced evictions. Raft is a monument and a memorial to development and destruction. There is no stopping the destruction of homes. Local paper Khmer Machas Srok noted on March 18, 2010 that two foreign companies that had partnered with Shakaku for the project have officially withdrawn. The paper cited an unnamed senior economist who stated, “big international companies with a good reputation worldwide do not want to invest millions of dollars in a country where transparent solutions have not been offered to citizens.” Despite this lack of foreign investment, the project goes on. The “unknown” local developer’s lease was signed for $79,002,000 at 0.60 US$/sqm/year (Cambodia Development Watch). 287 Things are not what they appear on the surface. The Land Management and Administration Project was not wholly responsible for denying residents the title to their land. In effect the Cambodian government attempted to reverse its 2001 Land Law by issuing a sub-decree to convert the Boeung Kak area from State Public Land to State Private Land in August 2010 (World Bank). To appease critics, the Municipality of Phnom Penh announced a tentative proposal for the displaced; the resettlement plans for the evictees are still not confirmed. 288 They may disappear without a trace. Soon the lake will also disappear like a mirage. Liquid vision replaced by hot 286 sand. In its place will emerge a modern city, another oasis, another hallucination. Soon enough Pich and Seckon’s studios will be demolished. Only the debris will remain. Using the waste found floating in Boeng Kak Lake, Junk Nutrients is an abstract intestine spilling out strands of garbage including blue piping, caps, rope, plastic bottles mesh, tubing and so on. It also resembles a decapitated mythical nāga. Its blood spills out, solidifying as streamers of refuse. In Southeast Asia, snake blood and snake wine are reputed to have a wide range of medicinal as well as sexual benefits. But this nāga’s blood is not like Zeus’ blood in which offspring spring forth. The piece also looks like the aftermath of a divination using the entrails of some rough beast. Entrail divination has been used in many cultures throughout time, ranging from sacrificial animals to men. The future’s not ours to see. Figure 36: Sopheap Pich, Junk Nutrients, 2009 bamboo, rattan, wire, plastic, rubber, metal, cloth, resin, 165 x 124 x 74 cm (65 x 49 x 29 in.) 287 While still structured of bamboo and rattan, gone are the open grids of his other work. The “intestine” is covered in large alternating stripes of burlap, used by farmers, framed by strips of bamboo. In an uncovered section without the dyed crimson burlap, one can see within, the intestine is filled also with trash. The nāga too, like the settlers of Boeung Kok, has been surviving off of the lake. The lake’s reeds and vegetation has vanished; it must subsist on a diet of junk food. This work marks a formal departure for Pich. His other sculptural work is quite Spartan: just bamboo, rattan and metal wire. Again Pich is attempting to push his practice further: “. . . new questions began to appear, and so new steps or experiments were taken: I began to use other materials – burlaps, farm tools, wood, plastic, paints, etc. There was a need to put a more distinct ‘subject matter’ in the objects.” Where does this need to have more distinctive subject matter come from? Although he states his work has always attempted to reveal social and political facets of Cambodia, the concepts behind the work are becoming less “abstract” and more specific in terms of narrative. Let’s go to an earlier, pivotal work which Pich has created in several iterations, including as a monumental outdoor sculptural installation in cast metal at the new King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia. Cycle, also shown as part of The Pulse Within exhibit, was the second sculpture created after the artist’s initial break-through in 2004: a pair of grated rattan lungs. Continuing his investigation of internal organs, Cycle is essentially two stomachs, connected. But this does not describe how stunning the monumental and frail piece is in person. Upon experiencing the piece in a gallery space, one experiences it as form and line, both open and enclosed, shadow and light. Its sheer formal qualities impress the 288 viewer first, and then the conceptual references step in. Pich’s work stands in stark contrast to other conceptual work which does not privilege aesthetics, a sort of anti- aesthetic aesthetic. The stomach is a merely a launching point, it becomes an abstraction. In his artist statement about the piece, Pich writes: A major issue in Cambodia, as I knew it, has always been the stomach. It was either that everyone’s concern was to fill it or to cure its diseases. Cycle took the shape of a stomach as a starting point to symbolize society in general. Connecting two stomachs together then suggested ideas of strong family ties or a society held together by simple means. It was also about fragility, controlled chaos, movement, and the ambiguity of the interior and the exterior. So there were questions about identity: am I inside? or outside? 289 Pich’s open-weave work is open to multiple interpretations. His statement emphasizes his formal preoccupations: chaos, movement, fragility. In a way, it is art for art’s sake, the antithesis of work dealing with identity or idea-driven work. Most of his early sculptures are driven by form. But he wants his cake…As the title of his show suggests, the artist is still preoccupied with inside and outside, what lies beneath the surface. His rhetorical question, “Am I inside? Or outside?” points at his liminal subject position in Cambodia and abroad. He is both an insider and outsider. As I have argued in the first chapter, the diasporic artist’s subject position is used strategically. He is an “insider” for the globe- trotting curators and collectors looking for “local” flavor. The statement’s introduction of the “major issue” in Cambodia as being the stomach marks his status as a cultural insider, a genuine Cambodian with knowledge about the country’s mores and obsessions. As an artist from abroad with education, flexible citizenship and language skills, he has cultural capital that sets him “outside” the norm, above and beyond the pack. He knows how to 289 translate this insider knowledge to the outside world. Yet he can be doubly marginalized as well, “trapped” by his chosen home and his history. Figure 37: The Pulse Within installation view at Tyler Rollins Fine Art Pich’s explanation of Cycle differs from critic Brian Curtin’s interpretation of the artist’s pieces in Frieze. Curtin reads the artist’s work as simple signifiers for issues plaguing Cambodia: “each piece functions symbolically: the stomach for hunger; the dogs the ubiquitous sign for scavengers in South East Asia [sic] . . . ” Curtin is simply projecting misinformed stereotypes of Southeast Asian hunger and famine, poverty and despair onto the artist’s work. Oh the beauty and the devastation. No Cambodia is not a growling stomach, a pitiable developing country, a developing ulcer. Lattice-work grid dogs are also a recurring presence in the artist’s oeuvre. They are not scavengers but they embody loyalty, luck and fidelity. Curtin should suggest that the scavenging dogs reside in Pich’s giant sculptural stomach since you know, they eat dogs here. Pich’s work strides the line between abstraction and representation, between minimalism—as Curtin 290 suggests—and the politics of identity, as Pich wrestles with. It is this in-between space that leads to uneasy, over-determined interpretations. “Cycle has that kind of suggestive tendencies [sic],” Pich concurs, “But it remains a sculpture; it doesn’t try to tell a story.” 290 Pich’s early refusal to tell a story perhaps has exactly to do with his insider/outsider status. He did not want to trot out his traumas. He wants to deal with the current sociopolitical condition of Cambodia, but in an abstract, evocative manner. But Curtin’s growling stomach is very different from Pich’s symbol of society. Pich may be articulating the difference between media, between his original discipline of painting and his later adopted medium, sculpture. Art historically, painting often proffers narrative, represents the world. It was not until the “revolution” of abstract expressionism did painting break free from its bonds of narrative. For Pich, sculpture is largely a formal exploration which does not tell a story. The amorphous shapes may trigger associations. So why the shift to more distinct subject matter—the shift to story-telling? Maybe Pich got sick of the open-ended interpretations of artwork about Cambodia by a Cambodian. So he will spell it out for you. It’s not about scavenging dogs, stupid. No, the stomach isn’t about neoliberal visions of third world hunger and mind boggling poverty rates. Stuck between inside and outside, he must be a cultural interpreter but he’s dictating the terms of engagement. So back to the storyline. Back to the plot. Back to the plots of land. Back to Boeung Kak Lake. Land grabbing is a serious issue throughout Cambodia, not just in Boeung Kak Lake, not just in its urban centers. Boeung Kak Lake may be its most visible and manifestation due to the international attention paid to it. In other places, land is 291 taken away silently, people displaced without a trace. But no one cares. In 2009, Human Rights Watch reported that Camdodia’s “epidemic” of coerced displacement of the urban poor and the confiscation of villagers’ farmland has “reached crisis proportions . . . Military units were often deployed to carry out forced and violent evictions of villagers whose ownership claims to the land had never been properly or fairly dealt with by a court.” In Phnom Penh, 10percent of the city’s approximately 1.3 million residents have been displaced since 1990—about 133,000 people. As noted, country denizens are vulnerable as well: “rural landlessness has skyrocketed from around 13% in 1997 to as high as 25% in 2007”; the trend continues (Bank Information Center). At its heart, land- grabbing is about greed, about not having limits. Pich tries to get to the heart of the matter. Caged Heart is just that: a heart-shaped form enclosed by a low gridded circular cage. The heart itself echoes the construction of Junk Nutrients—parts of it are wrapped in burgundy burlap with strips of bamboo providing structure. One can see inside the empty heart. Inside the cage are metal hand tools used by menial laborers. Writing about this piece, art historian Boreth Ly observes, “the metaphorical and linguistic reference to a good versus a bad heart (as a way to characterize a person’s ethical and moral standing in society) is a common assessment in Cambodian culture.” So is this a good heart or a bad heart? The cage serves as a clue. The fact that it is caged implies that it is not a boundless, compassionate heart. It could be the greedy heart of a government bureaucrat or an insatiable developer. Yet this “bad” heart is also constrained by circumstance, he cannot escape the golden cage he’s erected. It is indeed an empty heart. Journalist Ron Gluckman writes, “Coupled with the absence of 292 tenure security, rapidly increasing land values have led to rampant land grabbing by powerful and wealthy elites, to the severe detriment of local communities.” The powerful and wealthy elites do not care for the workers, the farmers or the villagers; they are not concerned about the well-being of their fellow countrymen. They are bleeding them dry. They have bad hearts. Their greed grows, it cannot be contained. The increasing land values or the rising greed and resultant mounting poverty can be symbolized by the heart, which looks like it is swelling, growing beyond the limits of the cage. Perhaps the cage is not a cage, perhaps the cage is a symbol of order and constraint, of moral limits. Figure 38: Sopheap Pich, Caged Heart, 2009 Wood, Bamboo, rattan, burlap, wire, dye, metal farm tools. 130 x 117 x 119 cm (51 x 46 x 47 in). Or it could be that the owner of this benevolent, loving heart is “trapped” by his country. The heart could belong to one of the construction workers building the tall buildings, or a farmer, or a landless villager. He is constrained by his situation, caged. The heart could 293 belong to one of the former residents of Boeung Kak. Ironically the country’s growth would seem to guarantee a raised standard of living for its constituents, but unfortunately the opposite is seems to be true for the already disadvantaged. Gluckman bemoans this pattern, noting that “frequently the projects driving this displacement are beset with corruption and unjust practices, perpetuating a development model that favors powerful interests at the expense of deeper poverty and increased hardship for the most vulnerable.” The cycle continues. I believe it is both a good and a bad heart. There are no easy judgments or solutions. It is not an either/or situation. Similar in the way Pich’s sculptural stomach is the symbol of a society, this tattered heart is the symbol of a country with so many contradictions: generosity and greed, corruption and kindness, beauty and devastation. This sculptural heart, the heart of Cambodia, is what has been constructed by the tools, which are left there at the end of the day. It is an unfinished project. The gridded “fence” recalls the scaffolding erected around construction sites. Cambodia is a construction site, a work in progress, for better or for worse, for good or for bad. Cambodia is a country being built up and torn asunder at the same time. Its heart is torn. Although this work marks one of Pich’s first attempts to tell a story, to provide “distinct subject matter,” the artist does not give us a didactic message. In a reversal of his earlier claim about the medium—this is a sculpture, it tries to tell a story. It is a heartrending story. Perhaps the tools are there to fix something. But as the adage goes, one cannot repair a broken heart. The story continues. Pich delves even further into personal narrative for the 6 th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 2009, a significant regional and 294 international exhibition hosted at the Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane, Australia. I will not go into detail about each one of the five sculptural clusters. I shall briefly discuss the general installation, entitled 1979, which refers to a pivotal year in Cambodian history. Wanting to “tell a story of a time in [his] childhood just at the end of the Khmer Rouge period,” Pich presents a cluster of monumental sculptural objects made of his signature bamboo, rattan , metal wire and burlap alongside five small carved wooden buffaloes. The installation is presented in its own section, with an undulating white floor built to support the works. The interspersed small buffalo silently gaze up at the larger sculptures, giving a sense of some sort of mysterious journey. The larger bamboo and rattan pieces conjure up landmarks or symbolic sites and symbols; the buffalo (stand-in for the artist or as a point of identification for the viewer) help ground the installation. Pich writes about this body of work: My memory is very strong about growing up in that time, so I have many stories based on factual events. But as I get older, they have become more and more allegorical, or I am finding in them meanings and ideas that inform my understanding and my relationship to present-day Cambodia. So this group of sculptures is an attempt to visually describe what I, as a child on that particular journey, had experienced. (Pich) Pich presents his audience with an allegorical journey, a symbolic map of his traumatic childhood journey out of Cambodia. Among the evocative sculptures is a pared down “binocular” which looks like two pillars, a disintegrating Buddha silhouette, an oversize scepter, an elongated bomb/ missile, a lantern-like form, diminutive boxes that also look like a village, and so on. From these pieces, one gleans that his childhood experience is one of wonder and bafflement. Some forms are familiar and recognizable while others conjure a host of associations. As with all of his other work, he straddles the line between 295 abstraction and representation. The point of departure in this series is the addition of the buffalo. Pich was a “buffalo boy,” a boy from the country. Figure 39: Sopheap Pich, 1979, 2010, bamboo, rattan, wood, wire, metal bolts. Site-specific installation, APT One of the most striking components of the installation is the disintegrating Buddha torso. The Buddha’s head and shoulders are formed in Pich’s familiar rattan grid. The rest of the body, however, is unfinished: long strips of rattan hang suggesting the rest of the body. The strips’ ends point to and fro, some curve upwards. Its tips are tinged with red, barely visible. One thinks of the Buddhist mantra: form is emptiness; emptiness is form. The most celebrated of the Buddhist sutras, it comes from the Prajna Paramita 296 Hridaya Sutra, or the Heart Sutra—the distillation of the teachings on emptiness. Emptiness is not nothing, and not a nihilistic viewpoint. Figure 40: Sopheap Pich, Buddha (from 1979 series) 2009 Rattan, wire, dye | 220 x 70 x 110cm (approx) | Project for APT6 In Buddhism, the concept of emptiness refers to the interdependence of all things, both physical and mental. Über-monk Thích Nhất Hạnh explains, “You are only made of non-you elements.” Your body and your being is dependent on the rest of the world. Your physical body is made up of many elements—water, dust, sunlight, plants, the universe. Independent existence is a construction: you cannot live as an isolated, independent entity. Every day we depend on others for our sustenance. We depend on the invisible garment factory worker to craft our clothing, the farmer to grow our food, the supermarket clerk to stock that food. 297 The dividing line between physical bodies and objects, between inside and outside is also blurred. We constantly lose parts of ourselves, shedding, regenerating and repairing skin, hair, organs and so on. Our skin becomes dust. Dust is us. You are not the same person upon waking up in the morning—there has been rapid cell turnover. We constantly absorb the external world: air, water, earth. Your internal world is also a culmination of received language, ideas and experiences. There is no inherent existence. In other words, your mind and body does not exist independently. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. This philosophy seems to guide Pich’s oeuvre. His Buddha’s body is both empty and solid. His work embodies absence and presence, emptiness and form. Pich’s unraveling Buddha also represents the unraveling of a Buddhist society. The orderly, rational grid which literally makes up the head unfurls. Social grids become undone. By 1979 in Cambodia, everything had come apart. Everything we depend on— the markets and foodstalls, the tailor, the policeman, electricity, water—is gone. In the countryside people are uprooted. Phnom Penh is evacuated, a shell of a city. It is the dissolution of the nation’s body. During a public talk in Phnom Penh in December 2009, Pich stated that during this time of upheaval, everything was turned inside out. As a child, he remembered entering a temple—usually full with monks and poor students who provided service in exchange for shelter—to find it barren. In his attempt to create a new order, Pol Pot targeted members of the “Old Society”: city folk, intellectuals, artists, doctors, monks, nuns, among others. Buddhism, a powerful institution, was targeted by Pol Pot because it was seen as “a decadent affectation.” At the time there were more than 65,000 monks. Muslim and Christian minorities were also persecuted. A third of the 298 country’s 6,000 monasteries, which also housed valuable books and artwork were destroyed. At that time, to make an image of a Buddha, including Pich’s, would have meant a certain death. 25,000 monks were killed (Shenon). The country was emptied out. Pich recounts an unforgettable image from childhood. Entering the inner sanctuary of a rural Buddhist temple usually humming with chanting and fragrant with incense, the young artist sees dots and trails on the walls—the blood of recently slain monks. The humid room is empty. “That was all that was left of them, these splatters,” he recalls. This is the memory that drives the creation of his flayed Buddha. Emptiness and form. Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. The artist dips the tips of his rattan figure in red paint as a memorializing gesture—a trace of blood. It reminds me of the glowing red tips of lit incense sticks—a prayer for the deceased. The lone figure of a monk splatters in space. It is a blood memory. 299 Love and Hate: Development in Việt Nam and Cambodia The traumas of history are echoed by the traumas of development. Yet the rhetoric surrounding development in Cambodia and Việt Nam is celebratory, often reported with awe-inspiring statistics: it is a brave new world. The Council for the Development of Cambodia (CDC) notes that within the past fifteen years, Việt Nam is the third largest foreign investor, following China and South Korea. Citing figures from the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Development, CDC Secretary General Sok Chendha notes Việt Nam has invested US$900 million to date into 63 projects in Cambodia, including US$100 million for Cambodia Angkor Air (Rasmei Kampuchea). This long-term investment has generated over 300,000 jobs in Cambodia (Vietnam Business News). The remaining top ten investors in order of ranking include Malaysia, the European Union, USA, Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan at tenth place. Despite the inspiring statistics of foreign investments and a pro-business government that actively courts foreign investment and aid, in a 2010 article entitled “Cambodia is Hard Sell for Investment Companies,” the New York Times states, “ . . . the cost of doing business is higher there than in many other countries in the region. Electricity costs are high because much of the energy is imported, while transportation is costly and slow because of poor infrastructure . . . Corruption is another problem.” Nevertheless the paper takes note of Cambodia’s strategic location: “Yet, for all the shortcomings, Cambodia is at the heart of developing Asia, surrounded by dynamic economies in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos.” Cambodia is not a lone nation-state but an 300 economy tied, for better or worse, to the growing tigers within the region. Cambodia’s location “at the heart of developing Asia” has been both a source of strength and weakness both historically and now. Its enviable location and abundant natural resources has partly been the root for conflicts over territory. Since the relatively small region is interrelated via trade, culture and commerce, it makes sense that Cambodia’s top investors include the “dynamic economies” of Việt Nam and Thailand. The CDC observes that most of the top ten spend most on tourism, comprising “48% of the investments, followed by 23% for the industry [sic], and also 23% for services. However, there is little investment in agriculture, which received only 6%.” It’s interesting that Việt Nam inverts this investment scheme, spending significant amounts on agriculture. Approximately 250,000 acres (100,000 hectares) are being located for the development of rubber plantations alone. The Southeast Asian rubber plantations featured in films such as Indochine are not extinct colonial sites. The structural, cultural and economic inequities still exist, but in a new technologically forward guise. Corporate mazes replace colonial manses. For those low on the socioeconomic ladder, the power structures shift slightly. Local newspaper Rasmei Kampuchea states that “Vietnamese investments in Cambodia include agro-forestry; agro-industry, especially rubber and sugar plantations; agriculture; mining; telecommunications; banking; and insurance.” 291 Việt Nam is contracted by Prime Minister Hun Sen to double Phnom Penh’s electricity supply in 2010 and beyond; currently Việt Nam supplies Cambodia with a quarter of its electricity. 292 Due to its proximity, Việt Nam also supplies half of Phnom Penh’s vegetables. Việt Nam 301 is also contracted to build a national road, a US$2 billion hydro-electric dam along the Mekong River, a bridge, among other projects. Cambodia recognizes its need to build up its infrastructure to ensure sustained growth and to continue to attract investors. Cambodia is one of Việt Nam’s top investment sites. But this is not just a one- way street (built by Vietnamese infrastructural investment). It’s a two-way highway of commerce and culture. Vietnam Business News states that “two-way trade turnover between Vietnam and Cambodia has increased steadily from US$146 million in 2001 to more than US$1 billion in 2009.” 293 In a December 2009 bilateral agreement meeting between the two countries in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, the Secretary of State of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ung Sean announced, “I noticed that the Cambodian-Vietnamese committee meetings are getting to a deeper level from year to year, because of the stability and the speedy growth in both countries.” In this statement, the Secretary attempts to highlight the increasingly cozy relations between the two countries. This relationship is presented as a symbiotic one between two stable peers despite the global economic downturn and the adverse affect on their respective economies. Their “speedy growth” indicates that they are both hurtling at warp speed down on the same highway towards the same destination— Modernity-ville. Never mind the two countries still have hot-button issues, but all’s fair in love and war. The declaration confirms their partnership; they are in it together, for better or worse. Admittedly, there is still some inequality. Ung continues, “The Cambodian economy has also achieves progress, though it is less than that of Vietnam [sic]. Thus, what we have achieved at present reflects the economic growth and the social 302 progress in both countries” (Kampuchea Thmey). 294 It is odd that he admits Cambodia’s economic development trails Việt Nam’s rise. Perhaps this is cultural diplomacy at its best—respectfully assuming the role of younger brother. By comparing Cambodia’s “progress” to Việt Nam, he implies that Cambodia will also have a similar meteoric trajectory, but it may have to follow Việt Nam’s lead and guidance. Việt Nam is portrayed as the dominant partner of the relationship. Cambodia’s deferential, submissive role is one which some nationalists have protested, a point which I shall discuss briefly later. The rhetoric of economic and social progress reflects a shift in the ideology of both countries. In this statement, economic prosperity equals social prosperity. Both countries are “achieving” social and economic success through “speedy growth.” Decades ago, social prosperity and development was equated with communist— not capitalist—ideals. Only about thirty years ago, the apex of attainment was communist brotherhood, not capitalist brands. Things are not as rosy and cozy as the Foreign Affairs Secretary of State would have it. Việt Nam is not greeted with open arms by all in Cambodia. Yim Sovann, a spokesman for the opposition Sam Rainsy party declared, “Cambodian sovereignty has been transferred to Vietnam over the past 30 years,” citing a host of problems including political suppression and unlawful Vietnamese migration (Sokheng and Strangio). Some Cambodians maintain that Việt Nam is a neo-colonial power which threatens Cambodia’s political autonomy and territory. They feel Việt Nam has become a dominant force within the country after its toppling of the Pol Pot regime. After all, the Vietnamese government did install a government after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese overstayed 303 their welcome. Others disagree about the role of the Vietnamese in Cambodia. Political science professor and deputy director of the Royal Academy of Cambodia Ros Chantraboth states, “In order to save the lives of Cambodian people [and prevent] the return of the Khmer Rouge regime, we needed Vietnamese soldiers to remain in the country to fight against the KR” (Sokheng and Strangio). Either way, even the current pro-Vietnamese Hun Sen government recognizes Việt Nam’s dominance, if not politically, then economically. As in the case of big brother China, economic might entails political might. Ung Sean’s statement that Cambodia’s progress is “less than that that of Vietnam” acknowledges this dominance. Cambodia is dependent on Việt Nam. All sides would acknowledge that it is an unequal relationship, despite assertions that it is a partnership of equals. Việt Nam is exploiting Cambodia’s natural resources and gaining profits from largely unilateral trade (despite what the statistics say). Cambodia is willing to accept this disparity since Việt Nam is giving what it sorely needs: the development of its infrastructure and the expansion business. In contrast to the anxieties over illegal Vietnamese immigration and other issues, official government policies policing travel and labor between Cambodia and Việt Nam has become more lax. It’s increasingly easy for Khmer and Vietnamese nationals to work and play in each nation. Among the new policies include the lifting of visa requirements for citizens of both countries traveling between Cambodia and Việt Nam and an extended allowance for Cambodian and Vietnamese laborers to stay for a year in either country. The direct result of these relaxed measures is a travel spike. According to rag Rasmei Kampuchea, over 120,000 Cambodians have gone to Việt Nam within a six month span 304 in 2010. Border crossings have increased 36%. 295 During one of my bus rides back to Phnom Penh, I sat next to a Vietnamese merchant who did trade in both countries. His home and family was in Sài Gòn but he traveled by bus to Phnom Penh five times a week. As trade and interactions between the countries increase, particularly the economic hubs of Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn, strict divides between nation-states become amorphous. The boundaries blur. The Vietnamese-Cambodian border, however, continues to be a highly sensitive topic. At the 2009 bilateral meeting, both countries concur that “The most important thing are good border relations.” The two countries are still working out border boundaries which will be finalized in 2012. In the meanwhile, both sides agree that “border markers put already must be maintained in place, but it must be ensured that there is no negative impact on the interests of both sides.” 296 Their partnership is one borne out of necessity and benefit. Contesting these gestures of cooperation, the Cambodian opposition party rails, “People living along the Cambodia-Vietnam border are losing their land because of a border demarcation process based on a 1985 treaty” (Sokheng and Strangio). In April 2010, the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) officially requested that the collaborative Cambodia- Việt Nam border demarcation process be suspended. The Constitutional Council dismissed this request, stating that it falls out of the Council’s purview. Sam Rainsy has been playing upon popular local fears and anxieties by stirring up anti-Vietnamese sentiment the past few years. The government has tried to suppress his activity since it is counter-productive to the lucrative interactions with “dynamic” Việt Nam. Rainsy has 305 already received a two-year sentence for pulling up six temporary markers along the border with villagers from Svay Rieng province on October 25, 2009. They claimed that the markers were illegally put there by the Vietnamese. Now living in self-imposed exile in France, Rainsy has most recently fined and sentenced to ten years in prison for disinformation and allegedly falsifying public documents related to the border. A google map produced by his party and posted on the party’s website claims border encroachments on Cambodian property by the Vietnamese. International human rights groups have decried Rainsy’s indictment as a serious threat to democracy in Cambodia, since effectively it leaves a one-party system. The Cambodian government is also concerned about its international standing but in matters related to trade dealings, not democracy. Anything that does not ultimately yield profit and contribute to “economic and social progress” seems beside the point. During Sam Rainsy’s sentencing , Phnom Penh Municipal Court judge Ke Sakhan stated that Sam Rainsy’s actions have “seriously affected” the government’s standing. Ke Sakhan declared, “The accused’s activity has affected the relationship between Cambodia and Vietnam.” The judge is stating the obvious. And such a voice of dissent puts billions of dollars—and perhaps the country’s future—at stake. The cost of modernity is high. Rainsy claims to not just represent his own individual opinion but rather the voice of the people: “Today’s verdict . . . reflects the Vietnamese government’s anger against, and worry about, me because I dared, as a Cambodian member of parliament, defend Cambodian farmers, who are my constituents, against continuous border encroachments by Vietnam.” Sam Rainsy’s claimed constituents—Cambodian farmers—are the 306 majority. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, over 80 percent of Cambodia’s population reside in rural areas and 73 percent make their living on agriculture. 297 Sam Rainsy states that he is simply defending the rights of his people. Since so many depend on land for a living, it is understandable how loss of land is seen as a major threat. But the threat may not be from the outside (including foreign developers such as Việt Nam, China, and South Korea) but rather from inside as the case of Boeung Kak demonstrates. It is domestic developers, alongside foreign ones, that are taking part in land grabbing schemes and causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands. And at the root, it is the Cambodian government which is at the helm, driving the giant bulldozer down the country roads, razing everything in its wake. Again stating the rhetoric of Vietnamese dominance and Cambodian dependency, Rainsy bemoans that the “verdict from a kangaroo court reflects Phnom Penh’s subservience to Hanoi” (Meas). The verdict is possibly an attempt by the majority government to weaken Sam Rainsy’s power by keeping him outside of the country permanently. Rainsy’s proclamation rings true in a way. As Cambodia strives to become more autonomous, it must still cow tow to its economic elders. Cambodia cannot adopt a policy of isolationism. In order for it to become the next Southeast Asian tiger, it must embrace its neighbours no matter how complicated and contested the issues are. From an international perspective, Cambodia remains forever linked to its Southeast Asian neighbours. The irony of Cambodia’s quest for political and economic sovereignty is that it must become increasingly beholden to and integrated into regional interests and investments. 307 The previous sections have detailed Cambodian urban development through the work of Sopheap Pich as well as the contested interactions between Cambodia and Việt Nam. The following segment discusses Phan Quang’s insights on rural changes in Việt Nam, followed by a brief revisit of a series on Agent Orange by artist Đỉnh Q. Lê as an example of how the traumas of yesteryear seep into the present. 308 Rice Country: Phan Quang’s Art of Place From Sài Gòn I got lost on my way to visit my uncle in the countryside, despite the fact that I have been to Đức Hòa many times before. Lively storefronts, dusty pavement and verdant expanses merged until the city blurred into a distant memory. Although I spend much time in the countryside—my cousins are farmers—I am a city boy. But I didn’t mind taking the hour-long detour through Long An, through the small dirt roads and endless sky. I know Sài Gòn and my family’s patch of the countryside well, but I still don’t know how to make the transition between the two. 298 Caught in limbo between the city and the countryside, I was glad to finally see familiar fields and street vendors, to finally arrive at my home away from home to beloved smiles. Another artist has an artwork entitled Một Cõi Đi Về (Spending One’s Life Trying to Find One’s Way Home). 299 Where is home? Is it in the city or the country, or in between? It has been a long homecoming. I wondered, as the divides between the city and the countryside blur, do Vietnamese feel disoriented? As Việt Nam develops away from a largely agricultural economy, do people feel lost? Many Vietnamese regularly make the pilgrimage from city to country for visits home (thăm quê), returning to the city for work. According to the 2009 census, an overwhelming 70.4 percent of Việt Nam’s approximately 85.8million inhabitants live in rural areas. The remaining 29.6 percent are urban dwellers. As rural-urban migrations increase, the distinctions between town and country blur. 300 Tellingly, Việt Nam has been referred to by anthropologists such as Philip Taylor as a “migration nation.” 301 Despite the large number of rural residents, the Central Intelligence Agency notes that the 309 agricultural sector’s economic output has been steadily shrinking, from 25 percent in 2000 to 21 percent in 2009. Industrial production now comprises over 40 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product, effectively displacing agriculture’s dominance. How does one grapple with these tensions and contradictions? How does one spend one’s life trying to find one’s way home? Rice Dreams For his October 2010 solo show at Galerie Quynh, artist Phan Quang deals with Việt Nam’s urban/rural divides and accelerated socioeconomic transitions. Through site- specific installations, large framed color photographs, and a video project, he comments on rural subjectivity. Born in the farming community of Bình Định, Phan currently lives and works in Sài Gòn. He is the embodiment of the blurred boundaries between the city and the countryside. Within and without the country, the city and the countryside become archetypes, bearers for modernity and tradition. The countryside takes on a mythic presence. In past propaganda, agrarian life embodies communist ideals of labor, equality and productivity. In current socialist-capitalist advertisements for tourism, shots of abundant rice fields signify Việt Nam’s “hidden charm”—a lushly exotic country (Kennedy and Williams). Writing about the countryside, Phan states: I was born in the countryside; farmer’s blood runs in me, but the city is where I choose to live. I know many people who reach a certain social position and then try to deny their origins. I think that’s a tragedy. Our whole life is a series of actions based on continuous effort to reach a certain result, to become a certain someone or to reach a certain purpose. You could say that the effort is to outgrow ourselves, to eliminate “backward” influences in order to move forward. But afterwards, are we happier and more peaceful? 310 The effort to “outgrow ourselves” may also refer to Việt Nam’s attempt to “move forward,” to develop. Instead of praising the logic of progress, his statement critiques the individual’s, and by extension, society’s effort to eliminate “backward influences.” Whatever is considered backward is dependent on political and cultural context. He challenges the assumptions of modernity. Việt Nam’s “arrival” within the global economy was cemented by its long-awaited membership in the World Trade Organization. Its 1986 đổi mới economic liberalization policy has ushered in a new era of market development, as well as inequities and labor exploitations. Within the rhetoric of global development, Việt Nam is quickly moving forward, without a glance back to its recent past of poverty and dirt. If the city is the future, the countryside is the past. Quê refers to one’s birthplace and quê hương to one’s homeland. Quê is also slang for tacky, backwards, or “country.” Phan elaborates, “In reality, in the soul of each Vietnamese, from the government to the people, in culture as well as politics, all regard farmers as second-class citizens, second place.” Farmers are simultaneously exalted and demeaned, regarded as both the country’s backbone and burden. Umbilical Umbrella In Phan’s site specific durational installation with accompanying documentation (video, text and photographs) entitled A Farmer’s Diary, the artist placed a giant umbrella in a large rice paddy for about three months—79 days to be exact—and recorded through various media (video, photography and a text-based log or “diary”) the growth of the field and the disintegrating umbrella at a distance, from a single visual vantage point. The mustard and crimson-lined giant umbrella (evoking the colors of the 311 Vietnamese flag) is a duplicate of ones used by imperial noblemen for shade. It may be seen as a symbol for long-standing power and the government. The artist noted that at first, the rice grew quickly under the umbrella’s shade. However, after the initial growth spurt, the shaded rice’s growth became stunted due to lack of photosynthesis. The rice growing without protection from the sun thrived. Phan states, “The umbrella represents an exalted, elevated part of society while the rice represents what lies beneath, what remains underfoot, yet comprises the majority of society.” In short, the umbrella may symbolize the highest echelons of society (perhaps its rulers and urban elite) while the rice stands for “the other half,” or rather, the other 70 percent rural population. A large photographic diptych documents the project which took place from February 2, 2010 to April 21, 2010 in Bảo Lộc. The first large photograph consists of a grid of smaller photographs of the umbrella and rice fields spanning approximately three months. These photographs are the postmodern equivalent of Claude Monet’s famous Impressionist haystacks captured in shifting light and weather conditions. Monet produced about thirty paintings between summer 1890 and winter 1891, near his home in Giverny (Tucker). In both projects, situated in the Orient and the Occident more than a century apart, one can see nature’s sublime, mercurial beauty. Bernd and Hilla Becher’s “objective” photographic images of Western industrial buildings are evoked by Phan’s straightforward framing. Yet Phan’s project insists on a more critical, politically charged read. Depending on the viewer, one may see a critique of state policies, institutionalized hierarchies, corruption, or social and economic divides within Việt Nam. 312 The second large photograph of the diptych is the daily log Phan’s artistic assistant, a farmer, inscribes in blue ink on a formatted brown paper ledger. The notes are mostly minimal: “Another hot day. I’m very tired today,” or, “Today my friend is visiting, have to get him drunk” and so on. In both photographs, gaps in images and text are due to the farmer’s absence. These gaps may also speak of greater fissures. For the viewer who cannot read Vietnamese, the untranslated scribbles become a formal composition. The issue of literal and cultural translation comes to the fore. For an international audience who may be familiar to varying degrees with Việt Nam’s past and present, Phan and his body of work represents the voice of a modernizing country. Or Phan may embody “contemporary Vietnamese art” since his imagery is rooted in place and rural identity. For a “local” Vietnamese general audience, Phan’s conceptual interdisciplinary practice may be a language that they are not wholly familiar with. For this Vietnamese urban audience, Phan’s work about the countryside may also be a glimpse into unknown terrain, or possibly territory too close to home. I sense that Phan is not interested in cultural translation, whether it be from country to city, or across countries. He is more compelled by the distillation of his experiences and viewpoints into fragmentary work that transcends transcription. He makes work that plays with—and upends—text and symbols. With a nod to Monet, Byron Kim’s long-term Sunday Painting series, started in 2001, also uses images of nature—a color field sky—with text, a diary entry. Kim reinterprets Daoist Chuang Tze’s writings on the infinite and the seemingly insignificant: the magnificence of the sky is paired with the mundane details of Kim’s life. 302 Phan’s 313 work draws a similar analogy: the immeasurable power of the state is contrasted to the impotence of its people. In a different reading, the umbrella eventually falters, disintegrates while the rice endures, and thrives without protection. A component of A Farmer’s Diary is a four-minute time-lapse video, rapidly edited to show changes in season—rice growing and dying. The camera remains static as the clouds move and the umbrella sways in the wind. This idyllic imagery has an up- tempo pop soundtrack: it seems like everything moves to the synthesizer beat, particularly the shifts from one frame to the next. The resulting dissonant video reminds me of Asian karaoke videos in which the images don’t always sync with the pop songs. Yet everywhere in the countryside in Việt Nam, Thailand and Cambodia one can hear the latest K-pop hit, Britney bump and grind, or Euro-trash synth beat echoing from cell phones, boom boxes, pools and pool halls. I often find myself tapping my feet to local covers of stars such as Akon or lesser known dance-floor favorite walking through town, or sitting on long bus rides from the countryside to the city. Phan states, “I want to describe a farmer’s life cycle, whose birth and death doesn’t have much effect on modern life.” Even though they are considered an insignificant demographic, Vietnamese farmers have profoundly impacted Việt Nam as a modernizing state. The decollectivization of the agricultural sector was an integral component of Việt Nam’s transition to a market economy (Ravillion and Van der Walle). From 1990 to 2005, Việt Nam’s food production nearly doubled. It shifted from importing food to being the world’s largest exporter of pepper and the world’s second largest exporter of rice and coffee. This agricultural productivity helped fuel the rest of 314 the country’s developing economy. 303 Despite this economic turnaround and an emergent middle class, the gaps between the rich and the poor continue to widen within and without Việt Nam. A case in point is China, which now has the world’s largest urban population. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Science, 46 percent (620 million) of its population are urbanites. Despite a booming middle class, its urban-rural income gap is increasing. This gap is the largest in 32 years, since the country liberalized its economic policies in 1978. 304 According to the Los Angeles Times, China is now ranked as the world’s second largest economy and the world’s third largest consumer of luxury goods. 305 Yet 36.3 percent of its population subsists on less than two dollars a day (Human Development Report 2009, UNDP). 200 million rural Chinese laborers relocated to cities to find work, yet many have moved back to their villages in recent years due to lack of employment (Central Intelligence Agency). Ministry of Agriculture official Song Hongyuan stated, “I am afraid the [urban-rural] income gap will continue to expand as the country focuses its efforts on urban sprawl, rather than rural development” (China Economic Review). As Việt Nam’s urban areas spread out, will its future mirror China’s present inequities? Mud Love A related large-scale photographic series features people from the countryside: some are nude, some are covered in mud; some men wear only safety helmets and trousers, other women wear white cut-out frocks. Trash and rice bags become body bags. Faces, eyes and farming equipment are poised heavenward, as if seeking salvation or 315 redemption. These various images are all haunting, staged portraits following in the photo conceptualist tradition of Zhang Huan, Jeff Wall, Pipo Nguyễn-Duy, and Gregory Crewdson. In one striking composition, huddled farmers caked in mud confront the viewer. One’s field of vision is sludge-colored. I am reminded of Pompeii, its citizens frozen in time, covered in ashes. Or the underworld of life-sized Chinese terracotta warriors, staring blankly ahead through space and time, mute witnesses. Phan’s country denizens become sculptures of mud, effigies. Phan writes, “mud is only a temporary cover, it doesn’t last forever. The farmers, regardless of who they are, can’t hide their original nature, where they came from . . . When I am able to be truly myself; I still want to speak with the accent of where I was born.” This view of origins is a nostalgic, romantic one, yet one which resonates with many Vietnamese. One’s hometown shapes one’s values and one’s world view. Phan speaks of the psychic changes of shifting from being a rural to an urban subject. As the American saying goes, “you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” The nature of rural life is being changed through infrastructural development. The Vietnamese government has bought large swaths of countryside and given farmers a subsidy for their property. Other areas once considered countryside are becoming increasingly urbanized as the urban centers sprawl outward. Hà Nội is rapidly expanding outward; some claim that it will become one of the largest capital cities in the world. Sài Gòn is following suit. Construction can also be seen in resort towns such as Đà Nẳng and Vũng Tàu; the face of Việt Nam is changing almost beyond recognition. 316 Figure 41: top: C-print; bottom: A Farmer’s Diary show installation view Another surreal photographic image reveals an interior with a row of pregnant women standing in a line, wearing white smocks over their colorful outfits. Each smock has a circular cutout at the stomach area; they evoke lab coats or medical garments. The vaguely clinical quality of these outfits bring to mind a host of associations: scientific experiments gone awry, a fertility clinic, or even the popular children’s characters 317 Teletubbies—colorful interplanetary creatures that also have protruding bellies. Underneath these smocks the women wear colorfully patterned outfits, commonly seen in Việt Nam. The artist notes: These mothers all hope for the best in their unborn children, like my mother, my wife and all of the other women from generation to generation. I cut the shape of a TV in front of their stomachs; I want to say that these hopes of theirs are also hopes that dwell deep inside of each individual’s soul. The women’s expressions reveal both hopes and anxieties. The “TV”-shaped cutouts, the disquieting hospital interior and the women’s deadpan upward gazes conjures an ominous mood. Phan Quang’s portraits of people from the countryside are not what one would expect. They do not have the Othering gaze of National Geographic editorials— spectacles of exotic color and ritual. In a way, these images are self-portraits of the artist and of Việt Nam, taken from the liminal vantage point of an insider and outsider; he becomes a translator of rural and urban Vietnamese subjectivity. Since Phan claims the countryside as his own, there is an intimacy and immediacy in the compositions. Nonetheless, Phan’s critical eye does not celebrate and embrace everything that is “rural.” For the artist, rural and urban spaces are undergoing tremendous physical and psychic changes. They both reflect states of mind, as well as policies of the state. In between the city and the countryside lie many contradictions. In Vietnamese popular imagination, the city stands for modernity and the countryside represents tradition. Shuttling between the two, Vietnamese are stuck in limbo. How does one spend one’s life trying to find one’s way home? In transit and in transition between the city and the countryside, things get lost, and lost in translation. 318 ………. As Việt Nam develops, the country attempts to lose its associations in the global imaginary with strife and suffering. Journalistic photographs of decimated jungles during wartime have been replaced by travel images advertising a lush paradise getaway. The same foliage is rebranded. The following segment discusses Đỉnh Q. Lê’s artwork on the persistent legacies of Agent Orange, the infamous chemical defoliant. The artist deals with trauma and tourism in Việt Nam and the shifting depictions of both. 319 Art, Dioxin, and Development: Đỉnh Q. Lê’s Damaged Gene Revisited His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise . . . The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History Agency and Agent Orange: A Preface An eight year-old Vietnamese boy’s face appears pockmarked. Look closer—his skin is shredded by shrapnel in the grainy black and white photograph. His mouth is half- open, perhaps in shock or sorrow, his eyes a blank stare. A row of large glass jars house dead, deformed babies, conjoined, monstrous: victims of Agent Orange. On a nearby wall, photographs of the toxin’s living byproducts are shown: villagers and urbanites disabled, disjointed, animal-like. The horrific collateral of war seethes from the displays of the War Remnants Museum in Sài Gòn: breathing figures variously half-burnt, mutilated by shrapnel, deformed by dioxin. This is the aftermath of the Việt Nam War, called the American War by Vietnamese. Outside the tree-lined streets of the memorializing space formerly called the War Atrocities Museum, this traumatic history seems forgotten. The endless motorcycles, gleaming storefronts and high-rises beat the staccato rhythm of a modern metropolis. The horror and devastation of a country ravaged by warfare is invisible, obscured by seductive billboards, malls, street vendors full of rainbow-hued plastic-wrapped goods, dreams of magnificent miles. Yet the American 320 War’s legacies remain hidden underfoot, beneath the concrete jungle’s well-heeled pavement, seeped in soil, streams, and blood. 306 For a decade (1961-1971), United States warplanes sprayed 18 million gallons of toxic herbicides to eliminate Việt Nam’s verdant foliage, which supposedly hid Northern Vietnamese armies (Graybow). The defoliant dioxin most commonly used was called Agent Orange, for its orange-striped containers. 307 Anthropologist Tine Gammeltoft observes: The precise impact of Agent Orange on human health remains contested, but mounting evidence suggests significant associations between dioxin exposure and increased risk of cancers, endocrine disruption, neurological damage, and reproductive health problems such as miscarriages and birth defects (2008). Anomalously high rates of Vietnamese birth defects and cancer is still seen today, several generations later (Fox 2007). There have been no large-scale efforts at environmental clean-up, which could cost billions. Việt Nam claims 150,000 cases of birth defects and up to 3 million cases of other related illnesses (the total population is 84 million) (Johnson, Graybow). 308 Washington disavows links between the chemical and illness, accusing Hà Nội of inflating statistics (Johnson). Trauma’s half-life is unknown. Bad press is bad for business. Diane Niblack Fox’s dissertation points out that the Vietnamese government at first was fearful about making Agent Orange a political issue for several reasons. First, the communist government had already promised not to bring up Agent Orange as a precondition for normalized U.S. trade relations. Although the U.S. denies any responsibility, it is still a sensitive topic. Secondly, the international attention on the toxin may adversely affect Việt Nam’s agricultural and seafood markets (Fox 321 2007:242-243). Việt Nam is one of the world’s top exporters of rice and coffee. 309 This link between ground toxins and agricultural products, no matter how tenous, could be devastating for Việt Nam’s export economy. Both Việt Nam and the U.S. are in denial. The United States government and its contracted chemical companies remain blameless. In 1984, seven U.S. chemical companies agreed to a $180 million ($240 million with interest) settlement to U.S. vets, about 291,000 people. More lawsuits from U.S. vets and their families followed but Second Circuit courts ruled subsequently that chemical companies are not liable since they are government contractors (Associated Press). In 2004, an NGO group called the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/ Dioxin (VAVA) launched a class-action lawsuit in U.S. courts against 37 chemical companies which produced Agent Orange, including Dow, Monsanto, and Diamond Shamrock. The lawsuit failed. A 2008 federal appeal also proved unsuccessful. The court denied direct links between herbicide use and Vietnamese illnesses, upholding previous U.S. court rulings. It is a Catch-22 situation: chemical companies are not accountable as middle men; the U.S. government claims sovereign immunity—governments cannot be sued. 310 Jonathan Moore, an attorney for the Vietnamese plaintiffs stated, “These decisions mean that, if these decisions are not reversed by the Supreme Court, the era of Agent Orange litigation has ended” (Graybow). As of 2009, there are continued legal attempts at finding justice. As the States grapples with the economic slump and wars abroad, it is not likely that the high cost of Agent Orange reparations will be a priority. 322 The Afterlife of Trauma (Collateral Damage) How does Việt Nam deal with its horrendous history as it embraces its new role within the global economy? The rhetorical and representational contradictions of Việt Nam’s horrific past and modernizing present forms the core of Sài Gòn based artist Đỉnh Q. Lê’s oeuvre. Lê first conceived of Damaged Gene as a site-specific art project in Sài Gòn in 1989. Chanika Svetvilas’ essay, “The Art of War,” features Lê’s description of the project: I rented a kiosk in the open market and sold handmade clothing for conjoined twins. The clothes were embroidered with names of companies that produced Agent Orange . . . I also sold Siamese twin figurines and T-shirts printed with statistics about the use of Agent Orange and the damaging genetic effect it has had in Vietnam. Yes, the project is didactic. But it intentionally serves a pedagocial function. The figurines, T-shirts, and hand-made clothing were not meant for a Vietnamese audience. The statistics are printed in English, aimed at expatriate tourists. For locals, the art objects questioning high/low divides are merely an oddity during a time when art was expected to be displayed in a gallery, not a market kiosk. Such a display was transgressive, as Lê explains: The project is a big departure for me . . . Culturally I was bringing a taboo subject and putting it right in the middle of the market for one month. It was the scariest opening I have ever held. (Svetvilas) I’m not sure how taboo the subject is in Việt Nam. The art project did not differ ideologically with the messages about Agent Orange at the state-run War Remnants Museum. The project echoes the party line, if only presented differently, although no less 323 creatively than the jars of Agent Orange fetuses. Lê may have been nervous but this element of danger increases the project’s value among international art audiences. Damaged Gene has been exhibited subsequently in museums and cultural institutions internationally. The small resin Siamese twin figurines, orange-hued modified plastic dolls with two heads, and pacifiers and knit sweaters made for conjoined twins are beautifully displayed in multiples, simultaneously evoking limited edition art objects and tchotchkes for sale at a gift shop or street side vendor. 311 In the (postmodern) age of mass reproduction, the distinction between “high” and “low” is increasingly blurred. 312 In this project, art becomes commodity and vice versa (with a nod to Duchamp, Warhol, Koons, Murakami, and Benjamin). Lê’s project deals with the complexities and contradictions of Việt Nam’s historical atrocities, contemporary market economy, as well as trauma tourism. It is noteworthy that the project was launched a few years after đổi mới, a comment on the challenges of both trade and trauma. Today, Việt Nam’s tourism industry markets its tropical beauty as well as its French colonial architecture and neocolonial charms. Echoing French colonial discourse, it is a jewel of Asia, a pearl of the Orient. 313 “Trauma tourism” is also popular. American vets and other foreigners flock to sites such as the War Remnants Museum, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Việt Nam, or the Cu’Chi Tunnels near Sai Gon, a seventy-five mile labyrinth of tunnels that was used in guerilla warfare against U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam-American War. Laura B. Kennedy and Mary Rose Williams note that the traumatic sites of the Việt Nam- American War catering to 324 foreigners “trivialize” it, making the painful past manageable, digestible, consumable (135-63). Kennedy and Williams state, “Turning the war into a tourist attraction means retelling, for profit, the story of Việt Nam’s victory. Since the profit must come from those who lost the war, aspects of the story must be muted and key roles recast to make the story more palatable” (145). The palette used to repaint traumatic scenes is severely limited, circumscribed. American losses are downplayed; centuries of anti-imperial sentiment muted. Simply put, the past is repackaged. In Đỉnh Q. Lê’s intervention on narratives of Việt Nam’s (revised) past, present, and future, he calls for accountability, using and subverting the logic of the market and trauma tourism. The repackaged past is reexamined. Lê reconfigures this past into cute, humorous yet haunting collectable figurines and dolls, accessories for real and imagined conjoined twins. The mass terror of Agent Orange is refigured (literally) as mass market items. The unmanageable violent masculine history of war is repackaged into domestic (read: feminine) objects used to decorate the home and body. In a way it is a metaphor for the way Việt Nam has reshaped itself in the global imaginary and economy. Việt Nam has been memorialized in the United States as a wound, a mistake. Once a metonym for a war, Việt Nam is now also known for its skilled, feminized, and cheap labor force on the global assembly-line (see Nguyễn-Võ). Goods—particularly clothing, accessories, and electronics—the world over bear the label “Made in Việt Nam.” Đỉnh Q. Lê’s creative output is also made in Việt Nam, yet is primarily shown abroad, as is the case with many of the artists in this book. For Lê’s 2009 group 325 exhibition in Germany, a country with its own over-determined legacies of trauma, the artist received funding to reproduce the components of Damaged Gene (figurines, clothing, and so on) to sell to the general public at affordable prices. You can own one of your own. To echo historian Hue-Tâm Ho Tài’s question, “Who owns the past?”—the intersections between history and memory and the politics of remembrance can be a minefield (in some instances both literal and metaphorical). She notes that in socialist systems public activities closely reference official cultural policies. Đỉnh Q. Lê’s public “intervention” over a decade ago, the first incarnation of Damaged Gene—the rented kiosk in an open Vietnamese market—challenged official policies in both Việt Nam and the United States. It critiqued the handling of Agent Orange as an issue, and the attendant the politics of the market and memorialization. His intervention and challenge, revisited, in another context and country, remains urgent and timely: again, this is a time of war, a time of market crisis. In dealing with the market, reparations, and memorialization, Lê questions the ownership of discourse on public policies and private pain. Again, Who owns the past? This question of ownership speaks of agency and commodity, art and commerce, authenticity and commemoration. The afterlife of trauma is indelible, spectral. From the halls of the War Remnants Museum, the eight-year old Vietnamese boy stares still—my angel of history, mouth agape in shock and sorrow—into the past, the present, the unfathomable future. ………… 326 Art Star(t) (Conclusion) The three artists I have discussed in this chapter—Sopheap Pich, Phan Quang and Đỉnh Q. Lê—all deal with traumatic changes within specific geographic locales, be it the city or the countryside. They have developed various strategies of presenting topical political subjects, ranging from formal investigations of line and shape (Pich), surreal image juxtapositions (Quang) and kitsch (Lê). All three have leveraged the politics of place and identity in order to attract varying levels of art world attention. Pich has combined his formal concerns with autobiographical narrative in work that is increasingly specific—explorations of memory, history and modernity. These concerns displace his earlier preoccupations with abstract volume and broad gestures at geographic rootedness. Every artist is a strategist who considers his audiences. Although genuinely concerned about—and connected to—Cambodia, I sense that Pich first had reservations about identity politics. Hence the earlier sculptural works which hinted at Cambodia but were largely explorations of the line between representation and abstraction. Sensing what is demanded of him as a diasporic artist associated with his homeland, an insider/ outsider who comes to be hailed as the artistic heir of a country, he gives his audience what they expect and want: traumatic stories. His two bodies of work, The Pulse Within and 1979 gives his audience a double whammy of trauma: the contemporary shock of unscrupulous land-grabbing as well as the all-too-familiar pain of Cambodian history under the Khmer Rouge. It is over determined that he provides us with these narratives. He has abandoned any ambivalence about making work grounded in identity as his identity as an artist is inextricably linked to his ethnic identity. If he 327 were still living in the United States, this may still be a source of concern for the artist— that he may be pigeonholing himself. “Great” contemporary artists such as Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst are not constrained and expected to make work about their personal backgrounds. It’s a double standard. The Caucasian male artist is not bounded by his ethnicity or gender; it is an invisible privilege. His subject matter can be free-ranging; he does not bear the burden of representation. Opportunities for Cambodian American artists working the United States can be somewhat limiting: one would be included in shows about, well, let’s see—trauma and memory. But as an artist living in Cambodia, Pich’s “difference” is exactly what international curators and artists want. He has greater freedom and range, to a certain extent. Talent unquestioned, he has greater and better opportunities for exhibitions by dint of his geographic position and subject position. Geography is fate. Phan uses his subject position as a buffalo boy turned city-slicker as a starting point for work that is not narrative, but rather evocative. As Phan is still a developing artist—The Farmer’s Diary series is among his first artworks—his somewhat unfocused output is still scattered and uneven. But he has caught onto the rules of the (art)game. He must deal with Vietnamese government censorship and make work that is not too bitingly critical. To satiate the demands of potential international collectors, it should be pretty with a touch of the political to give the work an edge. This is conceptual artistic practice after all, and not a interior design objet d’art (although the work may be called to function as such). Also a commercial photographer, Phan as a fine artist knows that conceptual 328 artwork should be commercial (to make commercial gallerists happy) but not too commercial. I maintain that Phan and Pich’s works dealing with exploitation and development are self-exploitative manoeuvres. Their privileged insight as cultural insiders allows them to create work that has a distinctly unique perspective. For example, I doubt that a Caucasian Australian colleague cannot make work about Boeung Kak development or Khmer Rouge trauma in as a heart-rending manner as Pich can. Perhaps this is my bias about authorship and auteur-ship. The audience wants insider knowledge. As a city slicker, I cannot claim the same level of intimacy with the countryside as Phan can. I cannot package this knowledge into a solo show. Phan presents himself as a country boy made good. He is the living embodiment of the vast changes within Việt Nam. One can argue that every cultural producer uses their own biographies and obsessions to fuel their work. Although fictional, every work is autobiographical in that it reveals its creator’s passion. In short, every artist exploits her or himself. Of course work that is deeply personal is highly resonant. As an art instructor once proclaimed, “The more intimate and personal it is, the more universal it is.” I do not agree with this statement and the claim to universality, but it captures a grain of truth. The personal is what one knows best. Autobiography is not self-exploitation. It is intimate knowledge. Pich and Phan not only offer up this knowledge in their works but sell their status as “authentic” specimens. For some collectors, only an authentic country-dweller can make convincing work about the countryside. Only an authentic survivor can make work about survival. Unless of course if the work is fictional or if the work is ironic. But for both artists, their works are neither 329 fictional nor ironic. What they do is offer up is a vision of difference. Their works are not seen as separate from their personal biographies by the international community. So instead of resisting this perspective, they wisely and strategically play to it. They do not make overly emotional work. Their work is not ethnographic or journalistic. It does not scream “whoah-is-me-and-my-malnourished-developing-country.” Pich plays the sympathy card but he does it with relative subtlety—what cynic could mock a harrowing life-threatening and brave childhood journey? Innocence and tragedy is a tried and true box office hit. Like the developers turning over bits of land for profit, Phan and Pich also turn over bits of their geographic and psychic turf for gain. But if no one is hurt in the process, there are no losers. As His Excellency the Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Secretary of State noted, it is a game—and a race—of “economic growth and social progress.” 314 The most seasoned and possibly the savviest artist of this Southeast Asian triumvirate, Lê eschews any autobiographical details for work that is pointedly political. Lê also uses his subject position in order to establish himself as Việt Nam’s premiere artist but engages in a different kind of exploitation. In the Damaged Gene series Lê uses humor, “cuteness” and kitsch as a strategy for dealing with the ugly realities of dioxins and birth defects. On one hand, his figurines and knitted twinsets for Siamese twins are highly collectable and unthreatening. On the other hand, the continuing problems which his works signify point at dreadful realities. Following Kennedy and Williams’ critique of trauma tourism’s attempts at making the horrific past more palatable, Lê’s figurines are self-conscious souvenirs in the Ye Olde Gift Shoppe O’ Trauma. Increasingly, sites of 330 trauma tourism such as Củ Chi resemble amusement parks, complete with animatronic figures. Yes, even the War Remnants Museum and Tuol Sleng have gift shops—who wouldn’t want a wonderful keepsake? Figure 42: Damaged Gene project (bottom: installation view) Lê makes this past horror palatable, collectable for a mass audience. In contrast, consider the War Remnants Museum’s handling of Agent Orange: pickled foetuses and grotesque photographs. Not a pretty sight. And not collectible unless one wants their field 331 of vision to be filled with gruesome gore alongside their gorgonzola salad in the dining room. 315 So is Lê using these horrors for personal gain? Well, yes and no. Lê once stated artists are public intellectuals and perhaps he is using the white cube (gallery or museum space) as an educational forum to enlighten the public about this largely ignored issue. The artist is also a political activist and educator. This deadly serious topic presented in a humorous form also lets Lê be taken seriously as a high-minded conceptual artist. Lê’s work is more insidious upon further consideration. It is not only about Agent Orange and trauma tourism but about the art world as well. He challenges old paradigms: high/low, terror/ cuteness, mass produced tchotchke/ limited edition fine art object. He may also be insinuating that the collector, gallery goer and art institution also engage trauma tourism (perhaps of the armchair variety), forever on the thrill-seeking hunt for the grotesque, seeking objects to display in their cabinet of monstrosities. He seems to say, “You want traumatic stories? I’ll give it to you endlessly. Here it is in its most gaudy, degraded form.” Sanctified subject matter (deformed babies! the horrors of war!) becomes profane knickknacks. Presaging Takeshi Murakami, Lê imbibes the culture of trauma and consumer culture and heaves it back for the viewer. Again, the “local” artist serves as a translator for a global art world about “local” issues that the rest of the world forgot about or did not know even existed. As I’ve discussed in my first chapter, I put the term local in quotes because the distinction between local and diasporic artists gets conveniently collapsed in international exhibitions. They all look alike after all. “Locals” are expected to deal with specific locales and problems, not purely abstract concepts. If dealing with nature, they cannot 332 simply make work about the Sublime. A Southeast Asian artist is expected to represent— to portray as well as embody —Southeast Asia, figuratively or literally. The artist’s images are sold as well as the image of the artist. And still the grim discrepancies between developed and developing worlds should come in a presentable package which obscures the conditions of their production. Consider the high-end garments made in Việt Nam or Cambodia produced in sub-human conditions and for sub-standard wages; the profit margin of one dress exceeds its maker’s monthly wage. Consider the artists who live and produce in the “periphery” who proffer everything and are only given scraps of recognition. No matter how internationally famous these artists get, they will never be able to achieve the same iconic art-brand refrigerator magnet / museum gift card/ boardwalk T-shirt status as an Andy Warhol or Pablo Picasso. They will forever be known only as “that” Cambodian or Vietnamese artist, albeit the most well-known one. You see, geography is fate. Whether on the assembly line or in the gallery, it is still a cut- throat market and its producers willingly come day in day out to be exploited. 333 Conclusion: Modern Love (Part Deux, Pas de Deux) Traumatic events cause a radical breach in “normal” life, drastically undermining psychological, social and/ or physical stability (Alexander 2-3). Cambodia and Việt Nam’s economic growth has resulted in a dramatically shifting socio-political, economic and cultural climate. Trauma theorist Anne Kaplan notes modernization is a traumatic process. In this chapter I have discussed the difficult changes and displacements that are part and parcel of modernity. Through the works of Pich and Phan, there is no doubt that the seismic shifts in urban and rural landscapes and psyches are anything but jarring. Pich, Phan and Lê jointly make the case that the traumas of history are not separate from contemporary life. The World Bank notes that rapid economic growth in Cambodia has resulted not only in decrease in poverty rates but an increase in inequality. Despite Việt Nam and Cambodia’s congratulatory narratives of achieved “progress,” “speedy growth” and glamorous visions of retail splendor and creature comforts, vast inequities make these changes possible. Modern love is not without its heartaches and disappointments. It is not enough to acknowledge these gulfs or even make artwork about it. Creative work is a way of processing these occurrences; it is a public exchange but in the end it will not affect public policy. These traumas become aestheticized, anesthetized. These incomprehensible stressors become contained as art objects. The excruciating transitions become dulled. To echo Patricia Yeager, is creative work, alongside critical discourse another form of ineffectual naval-gazing? We are merely consuming trauma. Artists are cannibalizing trauma for their benefit. They may knowingly or unwittingly offer themselves and their experiences up for ingestion—cultural cannibalism. Discriminating 334 connoisseurs tire of consuming the same standard fare and sometimes crave “exotic” flavor. Will it be Vietnamese or Cambodian? How to deal with the transformations in the city and the countryside? It is a matter of survival, as with other forms of trauma. Not to say it’s all bad. “Progress” has its upsides including higher standards of living and name brand shopping for those who can afford it. Modernity is marvellous. But modernity or post-modernity is complicated. It is hard to comprehend the changes happening in Cambodia and Việt Nam. It is even more difficult to draw out similarities and differences between the two nation-states, including their speedy growth and social progress. First of all, what do we call these transformations? Modernization does not seem entirely adequate. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has problematized the view of modernity as a “North Atlantic universal.” Although the clock of progress operates on homogenous time, many have challenged its assumptions. Heterogeneous times and timelines exist for heterogeneous geographies. Cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen writes, “alternative modernities with their deep histories and local contingencies now seems to offer a better approach than the imposed notion, say, of postmodernism in Asia or in Latin America.” The critical embrace of alternative modernities acknowledges the complicated histories of specific locales. Modernity does not happen overnight but in fits and spurts, through several periods. Over the long history of colonial encounters, postcolonial nationalist fervor and the current influx of mass media, nations develop unique identities (Gaonkar). But the implicit question of the term “alternate” or “alternative” modernity is: it is alternate to what? This term reinscribes center- periphery/ mainstream-alternate 335 paradigms. It implies that it is an alternative to the “North Atlantic universal” of teleological advancement. Yes we should have alternative models but not ones that perpetuate this core difference. I prefer Lisa Rofel’s conception of “discrepant modernities.” She explains the term: “I mean a world of forced and violent interactions in which emerges an imaginary space that produces deferred relationships to modernity.” With Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai’s “imagined communities” of affective identifications in mind, this “imaginary space” is the psychic space which the brutal interactions are processed. Modernity itself is an act of imagination, a projection of fantasy which transforms reality through the implementation of ideology. This space may also be the spaces which artists such as Pich, Phan and Lê create in order to grapple with the violent interactions they witness and attempt to bear witness to. Rofel notes that modernity is a political enterprise, not an abstract obtuse configuration critics and academics muddle over (but we do anyhow). She writes, “Modernity is something people struggle over because it has life-affirming as well as life- threatening effects. This struggle is what people share, like the floor of a boxing match (including fixed bets and outcomes), rather than a universal form with its local particulars.” Modernity is not simply good or bad, a solution or a problem. It morphs and changes; it is a shared struggle dependent upon its actors. Like Shiva, it is both destroyer and creator. Boeung Kak as we know it will inevitably be destroyed for a new vision to be created. The framework of discrepant modernities takes into account the incongruent, 336 divergent developments that occur over a long period. It is not start and then stop—now we’re done with modernizing. The history of modernity in Cambodia is very different than in Việt Nam, or in any other Southeast or East Asian country. It’s not the same old story. Driving through the countryside and the city in Việt Nam and Cambodia we can see these discrepancies and similarities. You see, it’s same same but different. 337 Chapter Bibliography Alexander, Jeffrey C., et al., eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2004. Chandler, David. A History of Cambodia. Westview Publishers: Boulder Colorado, 2008. Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Social Sciences. City's Blue Book: China's Urban Development Report No. 3. Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Social Sciences 2010. Central Intelligence Agency. The World Factbook 2009. Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2009. Curtin, Brian. “Sopheap Pich, H Gallery Thailand”(Exhibition Review). Frieze. September 1, 2007. London: Frieze Publications, 2007. Fox, Diane. "Speaking with Vietnamese Women on the Consequences of War: Writing against Silence and Forgetting,” pp. 107-20. Le Việt Nam Au Feminin: Việt Nam: Women's Realities. Gisele Bousquet and Nora A. Taylor, eds. Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005. Fox, Diane. One Significant Ghost: Agent Orange Narratives of Trauma, Survival, and Responsibility. PhD Dissertation in Anthropology, University of Washington, 2007. Gammeltoft, Tine M. Women's Bodies, Women's Worries: Health and Family Planning in a Vietnamese Rural Community. Oxford UK: Routledge, 1999. Galasso, Emanuela and Martin Ravallion. “Decentralized Targeting of an Antipoverty Program,” Journal of Public Economics, vol. 89(4), pp. 705-727, April. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing, 2005. Gaonkar, Dilip. “Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11: 1.192 Geographies of Modernism, 1999. Gammeltoft, Tine M. “Figures of Transversality: State Power and Prenatal Screening in Contemporary Vietnam,” American Ethnologist, Volume 35, No. 4, pp. 570-587, 2008. Gluckman, Ron. “Battle for Boeung Kok Lake.” Far Eastern Economic Times, 2008. Gibson, James William. The Perfect War. New York: Random House, 1986. 338 Graybow, Martha. “US Court Upholds Dismissal of Agent Orange Suit.” Reuters. 22 February, 2008. Online 17 July 2009. http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN22581489. Griffiths, Philip Jones. Agent Orange: 'Collateral Damage' in Việt Nam. London: Trolley, 2003. Hồ Tài, Huệ-Tâm, editor. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: California University Press, 2001 Huyssen, Andreas. “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World.” New German Critique 100, Vol. 34, No. 1, Winter 2007. Berlin: New German Critique. Human Rights Watch. On the Margins: Human Rights Abuses of Ethnic Khmer in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Kennedy, Laurel B. and Mary Rose Williams. “The Past without the Pain: The Manufacture of Nostalgia in Vietnam’s Tourist Industry,” in Huệ-Tâm Hồ Tài , ed. The Country of Memory. Berkeley: California University Press, 2001. Lê, Viet. “The Art of War: Vietnamese American Visual Artists Đỉnh Q. Lê, Ann Phong and Nguyễn Tan Hoàng. Yen Lê Espritu and Nguyễn-Võ Thu-Hương, eds. “Thirty Years AfterWARd: Vietnamese Americans and U.S. Empire,” Amerasia Journal special issue, Vol. 31, No. 2. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2005. Ly, Boreth. “Of Texture and Tactile Memory: Situating Sopheap Pich’s Work in a Global and Local Perspective.” The Pulse Within: Sopheap Pich exhibition catalogue. New York: Tyler Rollins Fine Art, 2010. Meas Sokchea. “Sam Rainsy Gets 10 Years.” Phnom Penh Post. Spetember 23, 2010. Nguyễn-Võ Thu-Hương. The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Nguyễn, Việt Thanh. “The Authenticity of the Anonymous.” transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix catalogue. Việt Lê and Yong Soon Min. eds. Seoul, Korea: ARKO Art Center, 2007. Pich, Sopheap. “Artist Statement.” The Pulse Within catalogue. New York: Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, 2010. 339 Pingali, Prabhu L. and Võ-Tong Xuan. “Vietnam: Decollectivization and Rice Productivity Growth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 40(4), pp. 697- 718, July. Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pranab K. Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee. "Capture and Governance at Local and National Levels," American Economic Review, vol. 90(2), pp. 135-139, May. Pittsburgh: American Economic Association, Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Pred, David, Sia Phearum, et al. “World Bank Agrees to Full Investigation into Land Activities in Cambodia.” Press Release, 28 April 2010. Bridges Across Borders Cambodia, 2010. Ravallion, Martin and Van der Walle, Dominique. “Breaking Up the Collective Farm: Welfare Outcomes of Vietnam's Massive Land Privatization,” Policy Research Working Paper Series 2710. Washington: The World Bank, 2001. Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Rofel, Lisa. “Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9(3): 637-639. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Roth, Moira. “Obdurate History: Đỉnh Q. Lê, the Vietnam War, Photography and History.” Art Journal 60, no. 1, Summer 20001. Berkeley: College Art Association Publications, 2001. Roth, Moira. “Traveling Companions/ Fractured Worlds,” Art Journal. Berkeley: College Art Association Publications, 1999. Shenon, Philip. “Phnom Penh Journal; Lord Buddha Returns, With Artists His Soldiers.” The New York Time. January 2, 1992. Online: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE5DE163CF931A35752C0A96495 8260 Sokheng, Vong and Sebastian Strangio. “Government Marks Liberation from Khmer Rouge.” The Phnom Penh Post. Friday 8, 2010. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Svetvilas, Chanika. “The Art of War,” Dialogue. Spring-Summer, 27-28, 1999. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “The Otherwise Modern: Carribbean Leassons from the Savage Slot.” Critically Modern, ed. B. M. Knauft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 220. 340 Tucker, Paul Hayes. Monet in the ‘90s: The Series Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Thayer, Carl A. and Ramses Amer, eds. Vietnamese Foreign Policy in Transition. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999. United Nations Development Program. Human Development Report 2009> New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. World Bank. Final Eligibility Report and Recommendation Cambodia: Land Management and Administration Project (Credit No. 3650 - KH), 31 March 2010. Washington DC: The World Bank, 2010. 341 Dissertation Conclusion Leaving and Returns It is Monday November 22, 2010 and I have returned to Phnom Penh—where I have been living for the past year and a half—only to leave again in a few days, uncertain of my return. Coming back that night to jubilant holiday throngs and riotous lights, I did not know that it would end in hundreds of deaths. Participating in a group art exhibition in Hong Kong, I timed my return so I could enjoy the last evening of the annual Water Festival—a national celebration extended over several days where millions from the provinces and countryside come to Phnom Penh to cheer their boat race teams along the riverside, stroll the capitol’s wide boulevards, eat and partake in the festivities—free celebrity concerts, product booths, rides, massive discount sales. In the twilight, crowds gather near the sprawling lawns and promenades near the golden National Palace to see and be seen, to gaze at glittering barges resembling giant lit movie marquees. The inky river dimples with shimmering orbs as the sky sizzles with fireworks—all around, constellations of light and laughter. Just off the plane, I am late, searching for my then-boyfriend among the masses along the riverside. There is no cell phone reception. The crowds are thick, one can barely squeeze through. An ocean of revelers. I finally spot Chris’ blonde mane and lanky six-foot-one frame towering above a sea of black hair at our designated spot in front of a restaurant/ bar/ disco popular with sexpats. We meet for a quick bite with our friend Sreymom at her guesthouse down a quieter alley. Exhausted, we walked home early, anticipating a visit with an artist the next day. In the morphing metropolis, this invisible 342 snapshot is one among millions of recollections, at the same time mundane and momentous. Memory and modernity is not linear. Memory does not unravel as a single chronological narrative; it starts and stops unevenly. Similarly, development is uneven and discrepant, as evident in Phnom Penh’s diverse neighborhoods including the Boeung Kak ghetto, the touristy Riverside area, and the expat haven Boeung Keng Kang 1 (Rofel). These neighborhoods have very different histories and stories. In this dissertation, I go back and forth in time and space to underscore this idea. Let me begin again. It is Tuesday November 23, 2010 and the last day Leang Seckon has in his Boueng Kak studio, where he has worked and lived with his family for the past twenty years—he has been kicked out, forcibly evacuated. The developers continue to fill the lake with sand despite mounting protests. His studio flat, once teeming, full of paintings and furniture and people (his mother and cousins were always there) is now barren, a shell. Several months earlier, he had moved many of his large paintings out, anticipating this day. A forgotten tattered paintbrush lies on the floor. Instead of his usual towel, Seckon has wrapped himself in white fabric to meet friends who have come and lend him support. White is the color of mourning. When Chris and I visit him in the morning, he is alone, enveloped by white. On the studio’s wide white empty walls, he has painted a mural as a memorial of sorts—a nāga, a dragon which scales the four walls. Soon, it too will be gone—debris on the street. On the main road next to Seckon’s studio lies Calmette Hospital. On the way back out, Chris and I drive past frantic families and bandaged bodies on gurneys. In front of the hospital, there are two large signs—two giant grids of hundreds of faces which evoke 343 the photographic grids at Tuol Sleng. Chris stops his motorcycle, wanting a closer look despite my protests to just return home. Reluctantly, I join the small solemn crowd in front of the signs. They are trying to find familiar faces among the color photos. Going to sleep the previous night, I received texts that “Diamond Island” (aka Koh Pich) bridge—a small bridge leading to where the festival had a large outdoor concert and fair—was the site of where hundreds died in a human stampede around 10 p.m., triggered by panic that the bridge would collapse. Earlier that evening, we had crossed the same bridge. A few days later I learn from various local and international newspapers that four hundred were injured and as many as three hundred and fifty died from being trampled to death or from suffocation. The rows of photographed faces all had their eyes shut. Women on the left sign, men on the right, a small crowd huddled in front. A few minutes earlier in his studio, Seckon said quietly, “It was not earthquake, or storm, it was nothing, only fear. I am sad so many die because of nothing.” A man recognizes a family member in one of the photographs and cries hysterically, cradling his motorcycle helmet. I want to hold him, I am so sorry, my brother. I remember the stark mid-morning light illuminating the grid of faces, many young and a few old, their eyes shut. On their faces, necks and closed eyes bloom inky bruises. A constellation of bruises. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen makes a televised public statement after the bridge accident claiming that it is the “worst tragedy in 31 years since the Khmer Rouge.” 316 Again, for a brief moment, Cambodia is on international news, this odd proclamation often accompanying headlines. Again, Cambodians are represented as a 344 traumatized, hysterical people within mainstream mass media. Bloggers and other pundits note that there have been other, less visible tragedies sparked by governmental corruption and uncurbed development. Millions have been displaced under the guise of “growth,” with Boeung Kak being one of the most notorious examples. Many have tried to come up with explanations for the bridge accident, ranging from inadequate crowd control to inappropriate or insufficient police response. To people from the countryside not familiar with such structures, the narrow suspension bridge felt like it was about to collapse as it gently swayed. My hypothesis is the panic spread so quickly among the masses because it triggered bodily memories and generational memories of distress—bombs and evacuations. Disaster and despair. My own panic attacks, debilitating in my teens and twenties, were often triggered by large crowds or situations in which I felt overwhelmed. These paralyzing episodes would occur unexpectedly, in the classroom, in the swimming pool. As I shared at the beginning of my dissertation, I have since connected my panics to the shocks of boat escape, inherited cultural trauma, and the sustained stresses of poverty and assimilation, among other factors. For some, system-altering injury occurs in a nano-second. Others endure duress for years, for a lifetime. Damage is relative. Damage depends on a host of relations. How and why destabilizing fear spreads is a mystery. Terror’s initial onset spreads through the body and through the social body invisibly yet indelibly. Panic is a form of immediate collective trauma, at first unmediated by culture. At times it may seem instantaneous but there is still a lag. There is a lag for the body to respond to the upset mind. There is a delay for individual suffering to register as a societal issue. There is a lapse for a 345 collective hurt to become a cultural trauma. Again, “trauma never happens once,” as Feldman notes (69). The original distress gets replayed, reevaluated, and reinforced in our minds and our communities as tragic incidents. We are stunned over and over. We want to remember and forget. The stories we tell ourselves and each other in conversations, in mass media, is a way to wrestle with the unfathomable depths. We revisit pain again and again. Seckon’s evacuation and the bridge accident are indelibly, inexplicably linked in my mind. I still cannot comprehend it, but they are linked by more than just the memory of my experiences that Tuesday morning. Driving on the road from the artist’s studio to the hospital, private grief and loss is separated by a few meters, a few minutes. Seckon’s former life vanishes quietly, unremarked and an unremarkable disappearance. Diamond Island’s victims died spectacular deaths. In the international news for a day or two—the pornography of bludgeoned anonymous brown bodies, wet faces contorted in agony. One private loss is invisible, the other losses hyper- visible but in the end, also politically invisible. The two separate but related incidents in Boeung Kak and at the bridge encapsulate the traumas of modernization. The battle over Boeung Kak continues. On January 17, 2011, Boeung Kak residents ended a weeklong peaceful demonstration at Freedom Park and gathered at the Chinese Embassy to deliver a petition to the ambassador over Shakuku Incorporated’s involvement. Instead, they were met by riot police who dispersed the crowd. 317 While documenting the evacuation of twenty families and the demolition of their homes on Friday, January 15, 2011, Phnom Penh Post photographer Sovan Philong had his camera and film confiscated by police. After 346 intervention from fellow journalists, NGO workers and villagers his two cameras were returned but Sovan was made to delete the images of the forced evacuations. An NGO worker at the scene noted that such intimidation tactics have been commonplace for the villagers since 2008. The worker stated what occurred that Friday “is a good reflection of the lack of delineation between who acts for the government and private industry.” 318 The divide between the public good and private interests gets increasingly blurred as Cambodia (and Viêt Nam for that matter) continues on its path of rapid development. Diamond Island (Koh Pich)— not a real “island” but a man-made development— was once also a slum community which was cleared to make way for commercial enterprises and future high-rises. The area, which now houses a strip-mall like multi- purpose beige buildings for conventions and weddings and a grassy park area, is being redeveloped with skyscrapers through a US$200 million plan. Diamond Island is owned by a prominent local banking family (Canadia Bank)—Prime Minister Hun Sen’s in- laws—who worked with the Cambodian government to host the Water Festival’s outdoor concert in order to promote the area and increase foot traffic. Hun Sen is claimed to have a major stake in Diamond Island and the bank. After the tragedy, the government refused to hold any parties accountable nor claim any responsibility for the accident. It instead offered compensation: affected families of the deceased received 5 million riel (US$1,250) for funeral expenses; each injured person received 1 million riel (US$250). 319 A friend who lost a loved one is angry; she says a life is worth more than a thousand dollars. 347 Another friend, Bich from Sài Gòn, visits me the weekend following the bridge accident. She morbidly wants to see the bridge for herself after reading about it in Vietnamese newspapers. Now blocked off and strewn with thousands of flowers, the still colorfully lit bridge seems incredibly small—almost a twinkling miniature bridge— compared to the larger-than-life scenes of duress in print and on television and computer screens. It is eerily quiet. Others are there too: on vigil, they are new melancholics. This moment of mourning, inextricably and inexplicably tied into dreams of the future and haunted by the past, marks a different horizon. In the next few days, they will physically come to this site again and again. In the next few weeks, the next few years, and for a lifetime and more, these melancholics and their families will revisit the scene of disaster as Diamond Island, and indeed Phnom Penh will change beyond recognition. We have yet to further witness how the public, artists and politicians will respond to, remember and represent Diamond Island and Boeung Kak, if at all. A flirtatious evening turns into tragedy. Dreams of golden miles, the promising mirage of high-rises obscures the desperation of those living on the margins. Desire and despair. Through artwork addressing the twin traumas of modernization and history, I have engaged with the complex workings of memory, projection and representation. Throughout this dissertation, I maintain that historical shocks and the trauma of modernization are not separate but are deeply intertwined. Modernity is not necessarily a contemporary phenomenon or something on the future horizon. The project of modernity stretches back in time, fueling wars, displacement and genocidal regimes. The trauma of war is not a legacy of the distant past; it is a contemporary reality as the battle for 348 borders—real and ideological—continues. Consider the current border skirmishes between Cambodia and Thailand, Việt Nam and China or the United States’ military and ideological interventions across the globe. Historicity and futurity gets blurred. Following Trouillot’s insight that “historical narrative [is] one fiction among others,” I maintain that narratives about the past and the future are mutable (6). Historical trauma is not a fixed event but rather one that gets reinterpreted and reinvented with each recollection. These personal recollections have public and political dimensions. By the same logic, modernity is also not a static conception. Modernity is not a fixed teleological project but one that is constantly reinterpreted, reimaged by its architects and the populace. These representations of these recollections and projections reflect many differing agendas, in the political arena, in public life and in the marketplace. The line between trauma and desire can be a thin one. On the international art market, devastating losses become transformed, translated into delectable art items. Sometimes this “translation” is by those who have witnessed firsthand the traumas of genocide, war or rapid development including artists such as Leang Seckon, Phan Quang and Sopheap Pich. Their “direct” experiences rendered through art functions as both testimonial and memorial. Phan and Pich have witnessed the injustice of corrupt companies altering the urban and rural landscape. Their work both critiques and capitalizes on these changes. Seckon’s canvases and collages turn private pain into an act of public memorialization. 349 Other artists access trauma through other archives, both institutional and individual. Hồng-An Trương’s experimental videos deal with modernity and violence at a remove through appropriated institutional archival footage and images. She notes that the colonial project is indeed about modernization and civility, drawing echoes between then and now. Rithy Panh uses both the archival documents of torture at Tuol Sleng as well as its archivists—its prison guards and interrogators. S-21’s victims and perpetrators are living archives themselves whose embodied memories, narratives and re-enactments provide tangible irrefutable evidence that such atrocities occurred despite official denials. Finally, Tiffany Chung’s use of maps—both archival and ones used for future plans— chart the ways the past and the future, history and modernity are enmeshed. Beyond breaking down distinctions in time—the past, present and future, I also question the parameters of place and belonging. Examining the oeuvre of artists with ties to Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn, I have questioned parameters of “diasporic” and “local.” Filmmakers such as Spencer Nakasako and Mike Siv make work that draw connections between “local” and “diasporic” subject positions while acknowledging differences and divides. Overseas artists living in Southeast Asia such as Sandrine Llouquet or Sopheap Pich may be marketed—and identify—as “local” whereas their “local” counterparts including Leang Seckon have “diasporic” outlooks. These artists are both insiders and outsiders. Art scenes look different from the outside, the inside, and in between. I have used a range of methodologies to understand how artists and cultural organizers self-identify and are identified by critics, gallerists, and arts organizations in Cambodia, Viêt Nam, 350 and abroad. The discipline of art history demonstrates that a work of art does not exist in a vacuum, nor do artists. To grasp the complexity of an artwork, I relied on close readings of the work combined with studio visits and interviews whenever possible. I also considered critic’s and viewers’ reactions to the artpiece or film. Through participant observation and oral interviews, I gained insight about each artist’s unique process. Within anthropology, a self-reflexive understanding of my position as a researcher and how it informs my relationships with my subjects is critical. For almost a decade, I have built my professional and personal archives. I have built relationships with the artists and communities I write about in this dissertation. The line between labor and love is blurred. As the cliché goes, it is a labor of love. I have attended countless screenings, openings, talks, and art-related events in Cambodia, Việt Nam, the United States, among other countries. In turn, I have also given talks and have participated in or organized exhibitions. I expect these professional and personal relationships will nurture and sustain me—emotionally and intellectually—for the rest of my life. These are the faces and places I will return to again and again. Coming back time and again to physical and psychological spaces, real and imagined, we open up new ways to think about the relationship between history and modernity, trauma and desire. In reengaging personal and public archives, artists and audiences alike participate in forming new dialogues beyond dominant mass media and political narratives. By returning to the site of multiple engagements—military, social, business and even romantic—we recognize that trauma and desire are not separate affairs; they often inform each other. Again, the desire for modernity may have traumatic 351 consequences. Minority artists’ desires for international success may only be achieved by playing into over-determined traumatized tropes. Yet return also marks a break, a reconsideration. Return does not mean a repetition compulsion. To return does not reinforce a binary between eternal melancholia or “proper” mourning. In returning something imperceptibly, irrevocably shifts. These extended engagements, these return engagements, are ambivalent ones. Let me end by beginning again. Let’s return to the heart of the matter. 352 Comprehensive Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life; translated from the German by E. F. N. Jephcott. London ; New York : Verso, 1978. Alexander, Jeffrey C., et al., eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2004. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belnak Press, 2002. Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man.” The Location of Culture. NewYork: Routledge, 1994. 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Galasso, Emanuela and Martin Ravallion. “Decentralized Targeting of an Antipoverty Program,” Journal of Public Economics, vol. 89(4), pp. 705-727, April. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing, 2005. Gaonkar, Dilip. “Alternative Modernities,” Public Culture 11: 1.192 Geographies of Modernism, 1999. Gammeltoft, Tine M. “Figures of Transversality: State Power and Prenatal Screening in Contemporary Vietnam,” American Ethnologist, Volume 35, No. 4, pp. 570-587, 2008. Gluckman, Ron. “Battle for Boeung Kok Lake.” Far Eastern Economic Times, 2008. Gibson, James William. The Perfect War. New York: Random House, 1986. Graybow, Martha. “US Court Upholds Dismissal of Agent Orange Suit.” Reuters. 22 February, 2008. Online 17 July 2009. http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN22581489. Griffiths, Philip Jones. Agent Orange: 'Collateral Damage' in Việt Nam. London: Trolley, 2003. Hồ Tài, Huệ-Tâm, editor. The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam. Berkeley: California University Press, 2001 Huyssen, Andreas. “Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World.” New German Critique 100, Vol. 34, No. 1, Winter 2007. Berlin: New German Critique. Human Rights Watch. On the Margins: Human Rights Abuses of Ethnic Khmer in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2009. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 354 Kennedy, Laurel B. and Mary Rose Williams. “The Past without the Pain: The Manufacture of Nostalgia in Vietnam’s Tourist Industry,” in Huệ-Tâm Hồ Tài , ed. The Country of Memory. Berkeley: California University Press, 2001. Lê, Viet. “The Art of War: Vietnamese American Visual Artists Đỉnh Q. Lê, Ann Phong and Nguyễn Tan Hoàng. Yen Lê Espritu and Nguyễn-Võ Thu-Hương, eds. “Thirty Years AfterWARd: Vietnamese Americans and U.S. Empire,” Amerasia Journal special issue, Vol. 31, No. 2. Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press, 2005. Ly, Boreth. “Of Texture and Tactile Memory: Situating Sopheap Pich’s Work in a Global and Local Perspective.” The Pulse Within: Sopheap Pich exhibition catalogue. New York: Tyler Rollins Fine Art, 2010. Meas Sokchea. “Sam Rainsy Gets 10 Years.” Phnom Penh Post. Spetember 23, 2010. Nguyễn-Võ Thu-Hương. The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007. Nguyễn, Việt Thanh. “The Authenticity of the Anonymous.” transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix catalogue. Việt Lê and Yong Soon Min. eds. Seoul, Korea: ARKO Art Center, 2007. Pich, Sopheap. “Artist Statement.” The Pulse Within catalogue. New York: Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, 2010. Pingali, Prabhu L. and Võ-Tong Xuan. “Vietnam: Decollectivization and Rice Productivity Growth,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 40(4), pp. 697- 718, July. Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Pranab K. Bardhan and Dilip Mookherjee. "Capture and Governance at Local and National Levels," American Economic Review, vol. 90(2), pp. 135-139, May. Pittsburgh: American Economic Association, Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. Pred, David, Sia Phearum, et al. “World Bank Agrees to Full Investigation into Land Activities in Cambodia.” Press Release, 28 April 2010. Bridges Across Borders Cambodia, 2010. Ravallion, Martin and Van der Walle, Dominique. “Breaking Up the Collective Farm: Welfare Outcomes of Vietnam's Massive Land Privatization,” Policy Research Working Paper Series 2710. Washington: The World Bank, 2001. Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 355 Rofel, Lisa. “Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9(3): 637-639. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Roth, Moira. “Obdurate History: Đỉnh Q. Lê, the Vietnam War, Photography and History.” Art Journal 60, no. 1, Summer 20001. Berkeley: College Art Association Publications, 2001. Roth, Moira. “Traveling Companions/ Fractured Worlds,” Art Journal. Berkeley: College Art Association Publications, 1999. Shenon, Philip. “Phnom Penh Journal; Lord Buddha Returns, With Artists His Soldiers.” The New York Time. January 2, 1992. Online: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE5DE163CF931A35752C0A96495 8260 Sokheng, Vong and Sebastian Strangio. “Government Marks Liberation from Khmer Rouge.” The Phnom Penh Post. Friday 8, 2010. Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Svetvilas, Chanika. “The Art of War,” Dialogue. Spring-Summer, 27-28, 1999. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “The Otherwise Modern: Carribbean Leassons from the Savage Slot.” Critically Modern, ed. B. M. Knauft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002, 220. Tucker, Paul Hayes. Monet in the ‘90s: The Series Paintings. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Thayer, Carl A. and Ramses Amer, eds. Vietnamese Foreign Policy in Transition. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1999. United Nations Development Program. Human Development Report 2009> New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. World Bank. Final Eligibility Report and Recommendation Cambodia: Land Management and Administration Project (Credit No. 3650 - KH), 31 March 2010. Washington DC: The World Bank, 2010. 356 Endnotes 1 This phrase taken from Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore, a popular history of the predicaments Asian American migrants—Vietnamese, Filipinos, Chinese, South Asians, Koreans and Japanese—faced upon coming to the US starting from the 1800s. 2 Alexander Laban Hinton. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 8. 3 Patrick Heuveline has written extensively about the genocide. See the following articles for more on measuring the impact of genocide: Patrick Heuveline “‘Between one and three million’: Towards the demographic reconstruction of a decade of Cambodian history (1970- 79).” Population Studies 52: 49-65, 1998. Heuveline, Patrick. 2001 “Approaches to Measuring Genocide: Excess Mortality During the Khmer Rouge Period.” In D. Chirot and M. Seligman, eds., Ethnopolitical Warfare. Causes, Consequences and Possible Solutions.Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001. Patrick Heuveline. “The Demographic Analysis of Mortality Crises: The Case of Cambodia, 1970-1979.” In H. E. Reed and C. B. Keely, eds., Forced Migration and Mortality. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001. 4 Damien de Walque. “The Long-term Legacy of the Khmer Rouge Period in Cambodia.” Washington, D.C.: World Bank, Development Research Group, Public Services Team, 2004. Online 25 August 2011. http://www.hicn.org/FirstAnnualWorkshop_deWalque.pdf 5 For more info on the Cambodian Genocide Program 1994-2011, please see http://www.yale.edu/cgp. The Documentation Center of Cambodia located 19, 471 mass graves believed to hold the remains of approximately 1.1 million fatalities instituted by the Khmer Rouge. 6 May Kunmakara and Ellie Dyer. “Hun Sen Asks Vietnam to Supply More Electricity.” Business. Phnom Penh Post. 19 March 2010. 7 Heng Cheovan, “Talking Commerce in Cambodia.” Business. Phnom Penh Post. 31 May 2011. Online 6 June 2011.http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2011053149457/Business/talking-commerce- in-cambodia.html 8 The United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and the Small Island Developing States (UN-OHRLLS) site: http://www.unohrlls.org/en/about/ Online 6 June 2012. 9 Increasingly, postcolonial scholarship—which is cross-disciplinary by nature— has dealt with visual culture including work by Gwendolyn Wright, Hamid Naficy, Panivong Norindr, Annie Coombes, Kobena Mercer, Janet Hoskins, Saloni Mathur, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Alloula Malek, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Coco Fusco, Paul Gilroy, and so on. 10 Janna Braziel and Annita Mannur. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 357 11 Karin Aguilar-San Juan. “Going Home: Enacting Justice in Queer Asian America.” Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. Ed. C. McCann, S. Kim. New York: Routledge, 2003. 12 David L. Szanton, The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 13 For a discussion of the limitations and potential of area studies and a Southeast Asian American study, see Việt Nguyen, ““Refugee Memories and Asian American Critique.” positions: east asia cultures critique. Forthcoming. 14 Other scholars dealing with visuality and ethnography include Anna Grimshaw (The Ethnographer’s Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology), David Morgan (The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice), Catherine Russell (Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video), among others. 15 For more, please see Clifford Geertz, “Description: Toward and Interpretive Theory of Culture,” The Interpretation of Culture, (NY: Basic Books, 1973), Chapter 1. The author muses that we must continually “uncover the degree to which [an action’s] meaning varies according to the pattern of life by which it is informed. Understanding a people’s culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity” (14). 16 Margo Machida. Unsettled Visions: Contemporary Asian American Artists and the Social Imaginary. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 17 North Carolina is the home to a significant number of Vietnamese refugees. The exhibition lasted November 7, 2010 to January 30, 2011. The North Carolina Museum of Art describes Binh Danh’s formal photographic process: “To create his unique ‘chlorophyll prints,’ Danh starts by selecting a suitable leaf, then places the leaf on a felt-covered board and rests a photographic negative directly on the leaf. The negative is chosen from Danh’s collection of archival images that he has saved from magazines and other sources. Danh then places a sheet of glass over the leaf and exposes the leaf and negative to sunlight for a variable period of time—sometimes a week, sometimes several days—and lets the photosynthesis process of the sun and the leaf create the images. His most recent work uses the Daguerreotype process, the early 19th-century photographic process that also produces a single print that cannot be duplicated.” http://ncartmuseum.org/exhibitions/binh_danh/ Online February 16, 2011. 18 Erin Gleeson, Who Cares? 16 Essays on Curating in Asia. Hong Kong, Para/Site Art Space 2010. 19 Lê’s exhibition at MOMA took place June 30, 2010 to January 24, 2011. The website describes the installation: For Projects 93, Lê presents The Farmers and The Helicopters (2006), an installation comprised of a three-channel video and a helicopter hand-built from scrap parts by Le Van Danh, a farmer, and Tran Quoc Hai, a self-taught mechanic. Lê’s video interlaces the personal recollections of the war by Vietnamese locals with clips from Western films. While many of the interviewees relay childhood memories of the horrors associated with helicopters 358 during the war, the helicopter-makers share their vision of this machine as a means to make a better life for the Vietnamese people and bring strength to their community. Installed in adjacent galleries, the helicopter and the video projection offer a multilayered insight into the complex relationships between the Vietnamese individuals and the charged object of the helicopter. Museum of Modern Art New York website. Online January 16, 2011. 20 For more on the structures of art worlds and the relationships that sustain them, refer to Pierre Bourdieu, “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,” The Field of Cultural Production, Randal Johnson, editor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 260-263. Summarizing Bourdieu on the primacy of avant-garde cultural practice, sociologist David Gartman writes: “These cultural producers [artists] have more cultural capital (taste, knowledge, education) than economic capital (money); consequently their works match the dispositions of consumers in the social field who similarly have more culture than money. Bourdieu calls these consumers of high art the dominated fraction of the dominant class, or the intellectual bourgeoisie, which includes all professions that rely on knowledge and education for a living. Lacking the money of the dominant fraction or economic bourgeoisie, these people prefer culture that is more cerebral than expensive, more ascetic than self-indulgent-just the kind of art that innovative, avant-garde artists struggling for symbolic profits in the restricted subfield are motivated to produce.” David Gartman. “Bourdieu's Theory of Cultural Change: Explication, Application, Critique. Sociological Theory, V ol. 20, No. 2 (Jul., 2002), American Sociological Association, pp. 255-277. For further reading, see Pierre Bourdieu. "The Field of Cultural Production." The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 29-73. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. 21 The description of the work reads: Adrian Piper creates a poetic and philosophical duration performance in which the text “Everything will be taken away” will be written, in henna, on an unspecified number of participants’ foreheads that respond to an open call. The henna will be applied to respondents on May 1 and May 2. Written in reverse, the message becomes readable when seen through the reflection of a mirror, and the dye is anticipated to endure on the skin for 1- 2 weeks. The participants will be asked keep journals of their experiences and audience reactions during the project, then re-read the journals a year after the performance. Written directly on the forehead the text suggests the layered, shifting organization and loss of memory. It is both a promise and a threat. What will be taken away and what do we consider to be ‘our’ everything? http://www.adrianpiper.com/art/g_everything_no10.shtml 22 Rushdie keenly observes, “the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.” Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands” in Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books 1991), pp. 9-12. 23 Several diasporic Vietnamese artists call Việt Nam home, including Tiffany Chung, Hà Thúc Phu Nam, Đỉnh Q. Lê, Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba, Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, Phi Phi Oanh Nguyễn (phiphiblackbox.com), Rich Streitmetter-Trần (diacritic.org), and among others. All of the listed artists reside in Sài Gòn with the exception of Phi Phi Oanh Nguyễn. 24 For more on the structures of art worlds and the relationships that sustain them, refer to Pierre Bourdieu, “The Historical Genesis of a Pure Aesthetic,” in The Field of Cultural Production, ed. 359 Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 260-263. Summarizing Bourdieu on the primacy of avant-garde cultural practice, sociologist David Gartman writes: “These cultural producers [artists] have more cultural capital (taste, knowledge, education) than economic capital (money); consequently their works match the dispositions of consumers in the social field who similarly have more culture than money. Bourdieu calls these consumers of high art the dominated fraction of the dominant class, or the intellectual bourgeoisie, which includes all professions that rely on knowledge and education for a living. Lacking the money of the dominant fraction or economic bourgeoisie, these people prefer culture that is more cerebral than expensive, more ascetic than self-indulgent-just the kind of art that innovative, avant-garde artists struggling for symbolic profits in the restricted subfield are motivated to produce.” David Gartman, “Bourdieu's Theory of Cultural Change: Explication, Application, Critique,” Sociological Theory, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2002): 255-277. For further reading, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 29-73; and Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 25 Sue Hadju critiques the politics of representation as it pertains to returnees within the international art market: In Vietnam and Cambodia, artists that have come to represent these countries in recent years are often returnees . . . The presence of such artists sometimes inspires local artists or meets with resentment, particularly due to strategic global positioning or when shows claiming to represent these countries gloss over bio-data or the existence of ‘buddy-curating’ or cliques. With this region so fresh on the international arena, the opportunities are small and the outcome-risks are high. Thorough curatorial research into the dynamics and activity at ground level is rare and the situation is aggravated by ‘instant noodle curators’ who drop in for twenty-four hours, meet a few familiar names, then just add water. Curatorial principles fluctuate, with locals sometimes overshadowed by more articulate returnees, or the standards of complexity, conceptualism, criticality and originality de rigueur for overseas-educated artists being more leniently applied to locals, or trumped by market forces. A lingering exoticism means that international artists or photojournalists with long-standing practices in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam are frequently ignored. Sue Hadju, “Missing the Mekong,” Contemporary Art + Visual Culture Broadsheet 38.4 2009 (South Australia: Contemporary Center of South Australia, 2009), pp. 267-269. 26 For more on the development of the Vietnamese economy over the last several years, see the following articles: Keith Bradsher, “Vietnam’s Roaring Economy is Set for World Stage,” New York Times, ‘World Business’, 25 October 2006; Clay Chandler and Sheridan Prasso, ‘Vietnam VROOM: Asia’s Second-Fastest Economy Takes the Global Stage’, Fortune Magazine, 21 November 2006; Michael C. Mohnihan, “The Ho Chi Minh City Statement,” Reason Magazine, 26 February 2008; Martha Ann Overland, “Vietnam’s Troubled Economy,” Time Magazine, 9 June 2008. 27 “Economic Recession Goes Down,” (interview with Lê Xuân Nghiã) from VietNamNet, March 16, 2009, Look at Vietnam website. Online March 24, 2009. 360 28 “General Council approves Việt Nam ’s membership.” 7 November 2006, Press Release, World Trade Organization, http://www.wto.org/english/news_e/pres06_e/pr455_e.htm; “Việt Nam Joins WTO,’ World Trade Organization, 11 January 2007, www.wto.org/english/news_e/news07_e/acc_vietnam_11jan07_e.htm. 29 For more on globalization and its impact on contemporary art, please refer to Charlotte Bydler, The Global ArtWorld Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art, Uppsala University, Uppsala, 2004. 30 Art historian Nora Taylor has written extensively on contemporary art in Việt Nam: Nora Annesley Taylor, Painters in Hanoi, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2004; Nora A. Taylor, “Whose Art Are We Studying? Writing Vietnamese Art History From Colonialism to the Present,” from Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’ Connor, Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 2000. 31 Nonetheless, a good indicator of potential change is the bi-annual Festival Huế, which showcases artists and performances (visual art, music, theatre, performance art, traditional arts and so on) from twenty-seven countries. This year’s festival theme is telling of the impact of economic development: “Cultural Heritage with Integration and Development.” 32 L’Espace, British Council, and Goethe Institut all provide language instruction, and have archival holdings. For more information on L’Espace: http://www.ambafrance- vn.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=265. 33 For more information on Goethe Institut: http://www.goethe.de/ins/vn/han/enindex.htm. 34 British Council Vietnam: http://www.britishcouncil.org/vietnam. The British Council also supports Hanoi Grapevine, a website and group e-mail list which features ongoing updates on cultural events in Hanoi and Sai Gon: www.hanoigrapevine.com. 35 Describing the avant-garde art scene, critic and painter Joe Fyfe notes: ‘The Vietnamese government has not been friendly to this work and the artists have felt more comfortable with the extra ring of protection that an international organization provides.’ Joe Fyfe, ‘Report from Hanoi, Rienke Enghardt and Tran Trung Tin at Art Vietnam, Hanoi’, artcritical.com, November 2006, http://www.artcritical.com/fyfe/JFHanoi.htm. 36 Việt Art Centre: www.vietartcentre.vn. 37 For more on the development of contemporary art in Việt Nam please refer to Natalia Kraevskaia, Từ Hoài Cổ Hướng Sang Miền Đất Mới (From Nostalgia Towards Exploration), Kim Đông Publishing House, Hanoi, 2005) and Nguyễn Nhu Huy, “Asian Art Report,” Arthub magazine: http://www.nhuhuy.com/htmls/weblogs_detail_en.php?logid=228&f=1&mon=11&ye=2006, 3 December 2006. 38 Đào Anh Khánh’s website: http://www.daoanhkhanh.com 361 39 Ryllega Gallery was also an active alternative art space: http://www.ryllegahanoi.com 40 Art Vietnam is one of the most prominent commercial spaces in Ha Noi, is run by director Suzanne Lecht — a Texan who has lived in Việt Nam for over fifteen years. Website: http://www.artvietnamgallery.com. Interview with Suzanne Lecht, 3 May 2006. 41 Bui Gallery: http://www.thebuigallery.com/ 42 Suffusive Gallery: http://www.suffusiveart.com 43 Studio Thơ: http://www.studiotho.com 44 Maison des Arts: http://maisondesartshanoi.com 45 Galerie Quynh: www.galeriequynh.com/. 46 Zero Station site: http://www.zerostation.vn /. 47 Himiko Visual Café is both a gallery space and café : http://www.himikokoro.com/. 48 L’usine is a “lifestyle” store, cafeteria, with a separate gallery annex. http://lusinespace.com/category/gallery 49 See www.diacritics.org for more information on Streitmatter-Tran and his practice. 50 IDECAF is also known as The Institute of Cultural Exchange with France. The site has an exhibition space, library and screening room. According to their website, IDECAF (founded in 1982), “is an agency under the Department of Foreign Affairs of Ho Chi Minh City. Institute training function in French and creating favorable conditions for strengthening and developing bilateral partnerships Vietnamese - French in the field of culture.”Prior to 1982, it was known as the “French Culture Institute” under the auspices of the French Embassy. http://www.idecaf.gov.vn 51 Sue Hadju and Motoko Uda have run a little blah blah over the past few years; now Sue Hadju is the main director: http://albbsaigon.blogspot.com/. 52 Llouquet received her BFA at EPIAR [International Pilot School of Art and Research] Villa Arson, Nice, France and attended the Fine Art University, Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam. 53 Interview with the artist, August 2006. 54 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: the Ccultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NorthCarolina: Duke University Press, 1999. Ong defines “flexible citizenship as “flexible practices, strategies, and disciplines associated with transnational capitalism” that create new “modes of subject making and new kinds of valorized subjectivity” (1999, pp. 17-19). 55 Phạm Gia Kiêm, “Message of H.E. Mr. Pham Gia Khiem, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs To the Overseas Vietnamese Community,” Visa Exemption for Vietnamese 362 Residents Overseas, August 29, 2007, Bộ Ngoại Giao Việt Nam (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) website: http://mienthithucvk.mofa.gov.vn/Default.aspx?alias=mienthithucvk.mofa.gov.vn/en Online March 27, 2009. 56 Thao Nguyễn, “A New Narrative—Perspectives from the Post Việt Nam War Generation,” presented at Echoes of a War conference,” Casula Arts Centre, Sydney Australia, April 17-18, 2009, unpublished. David Fullbrook, “Vietnamese IT Follows Taiwan’s Example,” Asia Times, January 27, 2007. 57 Artist statement courtesy of Galerie Quynh, February 2008. 58 Bleu presque transparent, Cortex Athletico Gallery, Bordeaux, France, November 2004 59 Trời Ơi! Galerie Quynh, Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam, November 2005 60 Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality. Edited by Hal Foster. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 5-20. 61 Nora Taylor, Painters in Hanoi, p. 104. 62 The caricature-like white silhouettes in Milk recall Kara Walker’s fanstastical/ nightmarish room-sized black-paper cutouts which deal with the psychological, physical, and sexual violence of the Antebellum South and its aftermath. Yes, gender, sexuality, and violence also surface in Llouquet’s work like Walker’s, but in a more obtuse vein. 63 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 238. 64 Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, 247, translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 247. 65 Italics mine. In Freud’s essay entitled “The Uncanny” (1919), he attempts to delineate the evasive boundaries and qualities of uncanniness. As sociologist Avery Gordon suggests, “uncanny experiences are haunting experiences.” Uncanniness can be said to be related to fear, as well as the familiar and the unfamiliar. Freud states, “It may be true that the uncanny [unheimlich] is something that is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and returned from it, and that everything uncanny fulfils this function.” Tracing its genealogy, Freud notes that “the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the ‘double’ being a creation to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted—a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The ‘double’ has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.” See Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 230-233. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 363 66 Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses 67 This was approved in November 2008. From Thanh Nhien News: “Under the amended law, foreigners eligible to take out Vietnamese citizenship and retain their origin nationalities would include those who: a) marry Vietnamese citizens or have Vietnamese parents or children; b) receive certificates or medals of merit from the State or the Government for their contribution to the country; and/ or c) those whose citizenship would benefit Vietnam’s socio-economic development, science, national security or defense. These categories of foreigners would be exempted from some Vietnamese citizenship criteria, such as being able to speak Vietnamese and residing in the country for at least five years.” 68 Italics mine. “Vietnam house approves dual citizenship for expats, diaspora, “ Thanh Nhien News, November 15, 2008. Online: November 16, 2008: http://www.thanhniennews.com/politics/?catid=1&newsid=43761. 69 “Vietnam to Allow Dual Citizenship, ”Agence France Presse, November 14, 2008. http://blog.vietnam-aujourdhui.info/post/2008/11/15/Vietnam-to-allow-dual-nationality. Online March 27, 2009. 70 Associated Press, “Vietnam to Allow Dual Citizenship,” International Herald Tribune, November 17, 2008. Online November 21, 2008: http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/11/17/asia/AS-Vietnam-Dual-Citizenship.php 71 For a general English translation overview of the new Housing Law, enacted on July 1, 2006, see http://www.freshfields.com/publications/pdfs/2006/15848.pdf 72 “Property Ownership Restrictions Loosened for Vietnamese,” Pacific Bridge, Inc. Asian HR Newsletter, Volume 8, Number 3 (March 4, 2008): http://www.pacificbridge.com/asianews.asp?id=353. Online March 27, 2009. 73 This follows a July 2006 revision to the Housing Law (Article 126). Previously, Vietnamese expatriates were not allowed to own any property. Overseas Vietnamese who still retain Vietnamese citizenship may possibly be able to own several homes as well; this point is still being debated by the National Assembly. Under this proposal, only 750,000 (out of the 2 million overseas Vietnamese who still retained Vietnamese citizenship) would be eligible to own multiple homes in Việt Nam. 74 The International Herald Tribune article states, “There are an estimated 3.5 million ethnic Vietnamese living overseas, many of whom fled the country by boat after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 and sought citizenship in their new home countries. Many maintain close ties with Vietnam, opening businesses and sending more than $6 billion to the country last year.” 75 “Property Ownership,” Pacific Bridge, Inc., Volume 8, Number 3 (March 4, 2008): http://www.pacificbridge.com/asianews.asp?id=353. Online March 27, 2009. 364 76 I quote at length the Ministry of Justice’s response to a question about dual citizenship and children: Many nations grant children citizenship based on where they are born. How will the amended Law on Citizenship govern this? The Law on Citizenship confers citizenship based on consanguinity. In other words, if the parents are Vietnamese citizens, their children will naturally be Vietnamese citizens no matter where the place of birth. If one of the parents is not of Vietnamese citizenship, the parents can choose Vietnamese citizenship for their children. Because the granting of citizenship is based on consanguinity, children born in Vietnam to foreign couples will not have Vietnamese citizenship. But, in cases of children whose parents can’t be determined or who were abandoned in Vietnam, the children will be granted Vietnamese citizenship.In terms of international adoption, the law of Vietnam provides that Vietnamese children who are adopted by foreign couples will retain their Vietnamese citizenship until 18 years old and then have a right to choose their citizenship. “Lawmakers May Recognize Dual Citizenship for Overseas Vietnamese,” (Interview with Trần Thật), Tuỗi Trẻ (Youth), January 28, 2008, VietNamNetNews: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/social/2008/02/770835. Online March 27, 2009. 77 Ibid., italics mine. 78 The đổi mới economic reforms involved successive stages of opening up and closing off Việt Nam to market forces. 79 Tiffany Chung was born in 1969 in Danang. She received her BFA at California State University, Long Beach. 80 Chung’s solo exhibitions include Momentum, Mai’s Gallery, Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam; Fifteen Seconds of Fame at the Sugarless Factory, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan; and Beyond Soft Air and Cotton Candy, LMan Gallery, Los Angeles, USA; Wonderland, Galerie Quynh, Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam. 81 Graham Huggan, Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction ( Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 11. 82 Tiffany Chung artist statement, 2007. 83 Klaus Rohland and Christine Delvoie, “Vietnam Infrastructure Strategy,” World Bank. June 2006. PDF link: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTEAPINFRASTRUCT/Resources/CrossSectoralIssues.pdf 84 J. John Palen, The Urban World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992). 365 85 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow (Eastbourne, East Sussex: Attic Books, 1985). 86 Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, editors, Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2001). 87 Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 88 Gerry Turcotte, “Prologomena to Uncovering Alter/Native Scripts,” Hena Maes-Jelinek, Gordon Collier, Geoffrey V. Davis, eds. A Talent(ed) Digger: Creations, Cameos and Essays in Honor of Anna Rutherford (Michigan: Rodopi), pp. 145-5. 89 For more on the blurred line between the economic and the aesthetic , work and play, refer to Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman, Bourdieu: Fieldwork in Culture. Lanham, MD/Boulder/New York/Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 90 Masaya Shiraishi, “Phân Bội Chau and Japan,” South East Asian Studies, Volume 12, Number 3, December 1975, pp. 426-440. http://www.scribd.com/doc/9731737/1975-Phan-Boi-Chau- and-Japan-Masaya-Shiraishi. Online March 27, 2009. 91 Guy Faure and Laurent Schwab, Japan-Vietnam: A Relation Under Influences. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. 92 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan. For more information, see “Japan-Vietnam Relations” on the MoFA site: http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/asia-paci/vietnam/index.html. On March 3, 2009, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Sinh Hùng met with Hiroshi Shinozuma, president of the Kansai Economic Federation (Kankeiren) to discuss continued trade relations and official development assistance (ODA) despite Japan’s difficulties during the global economic downturn. “Japanese Investment Encouraged in Vietnam,” VietNamNet: http://www.lookatvietnam.com/2009/03/japanese-investment-encouraged-in-vietnam.html. Online March 29, 2009. 93 Gender cross-dressing within cosplay is also referred to as “crossplay.” 94 As feminist theorist Judith Butler notes, performance and parody create alternate identities and identifications. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York : Routledge, 1999. 95 Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) proposes to examine the intersections of mass migration, media mediation, and the imagination within a transnational context. Combining theoretical and methodological insights from anthropology (specifically ethnography) and area studies, the text speaks to the ways in which subjects are situated within and without territories and constructs such as the nation-state, postcolonial positionality, and ethnic affiliations. 96 www.galeriequynh.com 366 97 Interview with Tiffany Chung, March 2008, Sài Gòn. 98 The historic avant-garde shift from Paris to New York is due partly to diasporic movement during WWII, when top European modernists sought refuge in America. The cultural landscape was rezoned to its current coordinates by the confluence of European émigrés seeking survival and artistic freedom and America’s postwar economic might and its rash of collectors, critics, and institutions responsive to avant practices. 99 World Bank, “World Development Indicators 2008.”Washington DC: World Bank. 100 Matt Miller writes, “Collectors' appetites for Chinese contemporary art has abated slightly in recent auctions, while prices for Indonesian artists have jumped in the past year. That suggests rising young Vietnamese artists may soon come into their own as the auction houses and collectors keep trying to chase the next ‘big thing.’” Matt Miller, “The Vogue for Vietnam,” The Deal Newsweekly, September 26, 2008. 101 See Bourdieu, Pierre.1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 233. He writes, “The endless changes in fashion result from the objective orchestration between, on the one hand, the logic of the struggles internal to the field of production, which are organized in terms of the opposition old/new ... and, on the other hand, the logic of struggles internal to the field of the dominant class, which, as we have seen, oppose the dominant and the dominated fractions, or, more precisely, the established and the challengers . . .” Refer also to Pierre Bourdieu. "The Field of Cultural Production." The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, pp. 29-73. 102 Ethan Cohen Fine Arts: www.ecfa.com 103 Miller, The Deal Newsweekly, 2008. 104 Yue Minjun’s website: http://www.yueminjun.com 105 Recent articles on Vietnamese art include Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, “Vietnam's Rising Generation Awaits Recognition in the Sale Room,” International Herald Tribune, March 26, 2008; Jennifer Conlin, “The Awakening of Hanoi,” The New York Times, Travel, February 18, 2007; among others. Vietnamese art has been proclaimed to be “in vogue” for more than a decade: Philip Shenon, “Success Overnight, in a Sense: Vietnam's Artists Are in Vogue,” The New York Times, November 29, 1994. 106 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman, translators. The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990. 107 I will later discuss an international “ranking system” for artists. Bourdieu also uses the term “distinction” as a mark of difference: art used as a filter of class divides through connoisseurship. Bourdieu, The Love of Art, p. 111. 367 108 The gallery site states, “During the upcoming year . . . we will showcase a number of contemporary artists from Southeast Asia, one of the world’s most culturally diverse and dynamic areas. After many years of travel in the region, we have identified an impressive group of emerging and mid-career artists whose work we feel privileged to present to New York audiences, in many cases for the first time. We look forward to mounting solo exhibitions of these artists’ new works, as well as a number of group shows that will shine a spotlight on some of the most exciting trends in contemporary art in Southeast Asia.” Tyler Rollins Fine Art website: www.trfineart.com 109 Esta Ungar, “Re-gendering Vietnam,” Women in Asia, Louise Edwards and Mina Roces, eds., Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000, p. 312. 110 Việt Nguyễn. “The Authenticity of the Anonymous.” transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix catalogue. Việt Lê and Yong Soon Min. eds. Seoul, Korea: ARKO Art Center, 2007, p.63 111 Tiffany Chung “Ekinoberry Tree in Wonderland,” artist statement, August 2008. 112 In Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), cultural theorist Akira Lippit discusses the shadows of the twentieth century cast by new light-emitting “avisual” technologies including movies, x-ray, and atomic bombs and its residual traces in postwar Japanese cinema. 113 Harvey refers to “flexible accumulation” as resting “on flexibility with respect to labor processes, labor markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1990, p. 147. 114 When looking in a mirror, one sees oneself in a space which doesn’t exist, yet also sees their own own reality reflected. Foucault’s mirror is realized in cultural production and practices, a way of seeing oneself, reflected, refracted, a process of self-recognition and politicization (as Chung would suggest of the cosplayers’ critical potential). 115 I also think of the “father of conceptual art” Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” created from existing from mundane found objects, decontextualized and assembled (or represented) to create entirely new, provocative work. 116 Esta Ungar, “Re-gendering Vietnam,” pp. 312-313. 117 Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007, pp. xv, 144. 118 See Panivong Norindr, Phantasmic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, p. 13. 368 119 Miss Saigon is currently being developed as a feature film. For more on American filmic representations of the Việt Nam War, see Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 120 Mana Magat, “Sex and Drugs Sell,” from Eastern Horizons, No 14 June 2003, UN AIDS: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, fhttp://www.unaids.org.vn/event/sexndrugs.htm, November 24, 2006, online. 121 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. 122 Natalia Kraevskaia, Tu Hoai Co Huong Sang Mien Dat Moi (From Nostalgia Towards Exploration) (Hanoi, Vietnam: Kim Dong Publishing House, 2005). 123 Three women artists out of approximately one hundred attended this school. Nora Taylor, Painters in Hanoi. 124 For more on Vietnamese women artists, including historical and contemporary developments, refer to the Changing Identities xhibition catalog. Nora Taylor, Changing Identities: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam. Washington D.C.: International Art and Artists, 2007, pp. 19-22. 125 Nora A. Taylor, “Why HaveThere Been No Great Vietnamese Artists?” Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XLIV, no. 1, Issue title: Viet Nam: Beyond the Frame (Part Two) (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: Michigan Quarterly Review), pp. 149-165. 126 See Nora A. Taylor, “Invisible Painters: From the Cultural Revolution to Doi Moi” in Asian Women Artists, Dynah Dysart and Hannah Fink, eds., Sydney: ArtAsiaPacific, 1996. 127 I’ve written about Đỉnh Q. Lê’s work in “The Art of War: Vietnamese American Visual Artists Đỉnh Q. Lê, Ann Phong and Nguyễn Tan Hoàng.” Amerasia Journal special issue, Vol. 31, No. 2.: “Thirty Years AfterWARd: Vietnamese Americans and U.S. Empire,” guested- edited by Professors Yen Lê Espritu and Thu-Hương Nguyễn-Võ. 128 This feature is based on ArtFacts.net’s Artist Ranking Tool, “the most authoritative global evaluator of artists’international ‘activities’, regardless of auction records.” Sae-mi Kim, “Top 100 Asian Artists,” in Art in Asia, Jan.-Feb. 2009, Seoul, Korea. 129 Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba and is represented by the blue-chip gallery Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York, and Đỉnh Q. Lê is represented by P.P.O.W. in New York and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. 130 Georg Franck, “The Economy of Attention,” First published in German, in "Merkur", no. 534/535. Translated into English by Silvia Plaza. http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5567/1.html. Online March 19, 2009. 369 131 Quote from ArtFacts,net website. Online March 18, 2009. 132 Stellar art-world reputations and high-profile exhibitions may not readily translate to economic gains for investing institutions, as demonstrated by the cautionary tale of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s recent financial crisis in Los Angeles. Known as one of the world’s top museums of post-WWII contemporary art, its ambitious programming has included grand retrospectives of art heavy-hitters Warhol, Murakami, Basquait, and Bourgeois. MOCA first attempted to address its decade-long fiscal woes by cutting down on exhibitions, which inadvertently lowered overall sales and corporate sponsorship, often tied to individual shows. Since belt-tightening didn’t seem to work, now-resigned director Jeremy Strick tried the high (spending) road: bigger, better shows=bigger, better funding stream. MOCA invested in several high-profile, internationally-acclaimed exhibitions and proposed a renovation project for its satellite space (Geffen Contemporary) in the hopes of attracting larger donations and a wider base of public support. A December 2008 Los Angeles Times article observed that MOCA is in crisis, having reportedly accrued a $30 million deficit, and is contemplating bailout options. Los Angeles Times staff reporters Mike Boehm and Kim Christensen write, “Now MOCA's financial house is in shambles -- and this time it reportedly will cost at least $25 million to replenish the endowment and an additional $5 million to cover projected deficits for the coming year.” For more on MOCA’s economic crisis, see Mike Boehm and Kim Christensen, “MOCA: Bigger, Bolder, and Poorer,” Los Angeles Times, Entertainment, December 14, 2008: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/14/entertainment/et-moca14; Mike Boehm, “Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art has a Problem: Finances,” Los Angeles Times, Entertainment, November 19, 2008: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/19/entertainment/et-moca19; Beatrice Chassepot, “The Rebirth of MOCA LA,” Art in Asia, Jan.-Feb. 2009, Seoul: Korea, p.20. 133 Lê was born in 1968, Ha-Tien; based in Sài Gòn; MFA School of Visual Art, New York, NY, USA, 1992), For images of Đỉnh Q. Lê’s photoweavings, see http://www.ppowgallery.com/selected_work.php?artist=16 134 Interview with the artist, Sài Gòn, August 2008. 135 Nguyễn-Hatsushiba’s was born in 1968. He received his from MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Maryland, USA in 1999 and is based in Sài Gòn. 136 To view footage of some of his videos, please see http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/junnguyenhatsushiba 137 Press release, Arizona State Art Museum, February 10, 2009. For text and images, see http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu/2009/breathingisfree/index.php 138 Interview with the artist, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona, February 20, 2009. 139 I use the term Việt Nam War instead of the American War here in acknowledgment of the dominant geo-political perspectives at play when these artists’ works are discussed. 140 Việt Nguyễn. “The Authenticity of the Anonymous.” transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix catalogue. Việt Lê and Yong Soon Min. eds. Seoul, Korea: ARKO Art Center, 2007. 370 141 See James. E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. 142 Jürgen Habermas’ concept of the bourgeois public sphere has been influential on ideas of how publics are constituted and the role of discourse in influencing political action. However, his theories have been subsequently critiqued for its universalist assumptions and blindspots in terms of gender, class, and race. Habermas writes, “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” Jürgen Habermas (German 1962 English Translation 1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press. p. 305. 143 Nancy Fraser (1992), “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 109–142. 144 Panel discussion, Vancouver Art Gallery, April 10, 2005. 145 Italics mine. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination; transl. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 81. 146 An-My Lê was born in Sài Gòn in 1960, and is now based in New York. She received her MFA in Photography at Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA in 1993. For images of An-My Lê’s work, please see http://www.murrayguy.com/an_my/main.html 147 This quote is taken from curator Karen Irvine’s catalog essay for Lê’s solo exhibiton entitled Small Wars at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, October 27, 2006-January 6, 2007: “Lê was often asked to participate in the reenactments, her ethnicity presumably adding an element of authenticity to the make-believe. Over the course of the project she acted various roles ranging from that of a translator to, disconcertingly, a member of the Viet Cong. On occasion she included herself in her photographs, as she performed for the male audience that became, in actuality, her real subject. Sensitive to the fact that what motivates such men is often a complex web of psychological need, fantasy, and a passion for history, Lê did not make a mockery of their actions. In fact, some of her most heavily theatrical images she produced were the ones that she considered the least successful and ultimately edited out of the series. This strategy of avoiding parody allows viewers to form their own opinions of the events and, hopefully, to remember the gravity at their root . . .” http://www.mocp.org/exhibitions/2006/10/an-my_le_small.php. Online March 19, 2009. 148 Liza Nguyễn was born in 1979 in France. In 1994, she received her Master of Arts at La Sorbonne in Paris, France. 149 Liza Nguyễn, Souvenirs from Vietnam exhibition brochure, Gallery 44, Canada, 2007. Artist’s website: http://www.liza-nguyen.com 371 150 I think of Benjamin’s angel of history, face turned towards the past, wreckage, detritus piling at his feet. 151 Uncanny experiences can arise when one “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact inanimate.” Freud, “The Uncanny,” Standard Edition. 152 Love is a second-hand emotion, to echo La Turner. 153 Taylor, Painters in Hanoi, p. 103. 154 Interview with the artist, HCMC, May 2008. 155 “le mois de l’image”: http://www.lemoisdelimage.net/2008/index.php?l1=en 156 Interview with the artist at the artist’s home, August 30, 3008. 157 By “originality” I mean both original concepts as well as original work of art. Benjamin’s famous essay discusses the role of mass media and mass reproduction in shattering an original artwork’s “aura” (reverence and awe experienced in the presence of an original work of art). Now the artwork is endlessly reproduced, allowing for revolutionary potential: "Instead of being based on ritual, [art] begins to be based on another practice - politics." Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1935. 158 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. 159 I chose not to write in-depth about Nguyẽn-Hatsushiba and Lê for this chapter because there is already so much critical work written about both of them. I’ve written about Dỉnh Q. Lê’s work in “The Art of War: Vietnamese American Visual Artists Dinh Q. Lê, Ann Phong and Nguyen Tan Hoang.” Amerasia Journal special issue, Vol. 31, No. 2.: “Thirty Years AfterWARd: Vietnamese Americans and U.S. Empire,” guest-edited by Professors Yen Lê Espritu and Thu- Hương Nguyễn-Võ. 160 David Chandler, “‘The Killing Fields’ and Perceptions of Cambodian History,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 92-97. Film and cultural studies scholars David James and Marita Sturken also note the ways in which American agency is foregrounded within “docudramas” of the Vietnam War, with Vietnamese natives functioning as mere scenery of suffering. 161 Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds., Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2002). 162 Please refer to Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) for more on the concept of haunting and memory and the effects of violence. 163 Ibid., 8. 372 164 Alexander, “Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” I-2. 165 Ibid., 44. 166 This phrase is from Jeffrey Alexander’s article “Social Construction of Moral Universals” ” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al., eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2004), 227-229. 167 Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 8. 168 Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xix. Truillot examines the Haitian Revolution, the Alamo, the politics of Columbus Day, a proposed Disney theme park display on slavery, and other sites of social memory and erasure. Examining the way memory is constructed within historical narratives, the author reveals incompatible tendencies within historical discourse (i.e., a positivist view which “hides tropes of power behind a naive epistimology”; and a constructivist approach which “denies autonomy of historical process . . . [and views] historical narrative as one fiction among others (6)”). 169 Craig Etcheson. After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide (Westport: Kraeger, 2005), pp. 3-4. 170 Ibid., 4. 171 Terrence Duffy. Human Rights Quarterly, Vol. 16, No. 1. (John Hopkins University Press, Feb. 1994), p. 91. 172 Robert Sheer. “Cambodia’s Anguish: Made in the USA,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1997. 173 Laurence S. Moss. “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine review,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 2005. 174 Terrence Duffy. Human Rights Quarterly, p. 85. 175 David P. Chandler, “Revisiting the Past in Democratic Kampuchea: When Was the Birthday of the Party?” Pacific Affairrs 56.2 (Summer 1983), p. 295. 176 Lifton. Why Did They Kill? p. 1. 177 Karen J. Coates. Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: MacFarland and Co. Publishers, 2005). 178 Sheer, “Cambodia’s Anguish: Made in the USA.” 179 From Karen J. Coates, Cambodia Now, 2: 373 On October 23, 1991, nineteen UN member nations signed the Paris Peace Accords, effectively bringing the country’s civil war to an end on paper—yet fighting continued through 1988. While the world spoke of Cambodia’s peace, Khmers still continued to die in their homes . . . In 1993, the United Nations administered democratic elections through the UN Transnational Authority in Cambodia, the largest UN peacekeeping force to that point . . . The people were proud to go to the polls, and they gave Prince Norodom Ranariddh’s Funcinpec Party 45 perecent of their votes. Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People Party won 38 percent . . . Instead of perpetuating the status quo, Cambodians voted with their minds and hearts. Freedom of choice had won . . . And then it failed. More than a decade later, as Cambodia suffers from a crippled government, notorious corruption, rampant violence, widespread poverty and a lack of basic social services, scholars and analysts are backtracking in their assessments. Former King Norodom Sinhanouk has called his country an “international beggar.” Cambodia’s opposition leaders tell the World Bank that poverty has grown worse, despite $400 million of investments since 1993. And political violence still persists. 180 Ronald Bruce St. John. Revolution, Reform and Regionalism in Southeast Asia : Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam (London ; New York : Routledge, 2006), p. 179-181. 181 Ibid., 180. 182 Rithy Panh, “Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy,” Mānoa: In the Shadow of Ângkor 16.1 (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), pp. 108-126. A description of his other work from Wikipedia: “[Panh’s] His first documentary 1989 feature film, Site 2, was awarded "Grand Prix du Documentaire" at the Festival of Amiens. His 1994 film, Rice People, is told in a docudrama style, about a rural family struggling with life in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. It was in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The 2000 documentary, The Land of Wandering Souls, also told of a family's struggle, as well as showing a Cambodia entering the modern age, chronicling the hardships of workers digging a cross-country trench for Cambodia's first fiber- optic cable. More post-Khmer Rouge events are documented in the 2005 drama, The Burnt Theater, which focuses on theater troupe that inhabitats the burned-out remains of Phnom Pehn's Suramet Theatre, which caught fire in 1994 but has never been rebuilt.” 183 Rithy Panh, “Cambodia: A Wound That Will Not Heal,” UNESCO Courier. December 1999 http://www.unesco.org/courier/1999_12/uk/dossier/txt07.htm. 184 Ibid. 185 S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, DVD, directed by Rithy Panh (Cambodia: First Run Features, 2003). 186 In the Documentation Center of Cambodia Fact Sheet on S-21, Dacil Keo writes: The release status of the 179 prisoners (of which 100 were soldiers) is based on numerous Khmer Rouge documents and interviews compiled primarily by Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum 374 senior archivist Mr. Nean Yin. Most of the 179 who were released have disappeared and only a few are known to have survived after 1979. Of the 23 who survived after 1979, more than half have disappeared or have died since. Several of the survivors who are alive today have recently made the news: Norng Chanphal for being a witness for Case 001 of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, Vann Nath and Chum Mei for being featured in documentary films, and Bou Meng for having a published about him.. For a detailed list of released prisoners and survivors, see Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) http://www.dccam.org/Archives/Documents/Confessions/pdf/Fact_Sheet_on_S- 21_Tuol_Sleng_Prison.pdf and http://www.dccam.org Online 26 May 2011. 187 David Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison (Berkely: University of California Press, 1994), 4. 188 Terrence Duffy. Human Rights Quarterly, p. 91. 189 Italics mine. 190 Hinton. Why Did they Kill? 4. 191 First Run Films press release. 192 Ibid., 5. 193 Lisa Rofel, “Discrepant Modernities and Their Discontents,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 9(3): 637-639. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 640-641. 194 Ibid., 641. 195 See Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 12. 1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 196 Rofel, Discrepant Modernities, 640-643. 197 Michel Foucault; translated from the French by Alan Sheridan. Discipline and punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 198 Hinton. Why Did they Kill? 5. 199 David Chandler, Tragedy of Cambodian History, p.1. 200 Adorno states: Indignation over cruelty diminishes in proportion as the victims are less like normal readers, the more they are swarthy, ‘dirty,’ dago-like. The constantly encountered assertion that saves, blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys, for example, is the key to the pogrom . . . This throws as much light on the crimes as the spectators. Perhaps the social schematization of perception in anti-Semites is such that they do not see Jews as human beings at all . . . 375 Theodor Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life; translated from the German by E. F. N. Jephcott (London ; New York : Verso, 1978). 201 Vann Nath, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1998), p. 117. 202 Akira Mizuta Lippit. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 168. 203 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of hte Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 14: 239-260. 204 Ibid., 244. 205 Ibid., 240. 206 Ibid., 240. 207 Ibid., 248-250; italics mine. 208 Rithy Panh, “Cambodia, a wound that will not heal,” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0011/001182/118279e.pdf#118293 209 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss : The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 2-4. 210 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 69. 211 According to the DVD credits, the subjects who appear in S-21 include: Khieu 'Poev' Ches (Guard), Yeay Cheu (Him Houy's mother), Nhiem Ein (Photographer), Houy Him (Security deputy), Ta Him (Him Houy's Father), Nhieb Ho (Guard), Prakk Kahn (the Torturer), Peng Kry (Driver), Som Meth (Guard), Chum Mey (Survivor), Vann Nath (Survivor), Top Pheap (Interrogator & Typist), Tcheam Seur (Guard), Mak Thim (S21 Doctor) and Sours Thi (Head of Registers). 212 Author interview with Rithy Panh, Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center, Phnom Penh. 26 July 2010. 213 Author interview with Panh, 26 July 2010. 214 Leslie Camhi, “The Banal Faces of Khmer Rouge Evil” New York Times, May 16, 2004, 24. 215 Ibid. 216 Ibid. 217 Felman and Laub. Testimony, p. 117. 376 218 To download full reports on Cambodia’s economic progress, see www.worldbank.org/kh/growth. 219 Please see Human Rights Watch Cambodia country report 2010: http://www.hrw.org/en/node/87393. Online 3 September 2010. 220 According to the December 4, 2009 issue of Cambodian newspaper Khmer Machas Srok, The four top former Khmer Rouge leaders, who are at present already being detained, are the former head of state, Mr. Khieu Samphan; the former president of the National Assembly, Mr. Nuon Chea; the former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Ieng Sary; and the former Minister of Social Affairs, Ms. Ieng Thirith; in addition, there is also the former S-21 (Tuol Sleng) prison chief Duch, who was a middle level leader, who was brought first to the hearings. Vol.3, #546. 221 Robbie Corey Poulet, “S-21 Chief Downplays Role in Final Statements,” Phnom Penh Post. 26 November 2009, 1. 222 The film was also garnered the FIPRESCI Prize at the Leipzig DOK Festival, the humanitarian award at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, a special jury prize at the Copenhagen International Film Festival, among others. It subsequently screened at numerous festivals, including the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival (North American premiere), the Vancouver International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival. In 2004, the film received the International Human Rights Award at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema. 223 Seth Mydans, “Cambodia Arrests Former Khmer Rouge Head of State,” New York Times, November 20, 2007, www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/world/asia/20cambo.html. 224 Khieu Samphan, L’histoire récente du Cambodge et mes prises de position (Reflection on Cambodian History Up to the Era of Democratic Kampuchea) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 225 The Internet Movie Database describes Burma VJ: “Using smuggled footage, this documentary tells the story of the 2007 protests in Burma by thousands of monks. Directed by Anders Østergaard. Starring Ko Muang, Aung San Suu Kyi.” http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1823277593/ 226 Author interview with Rithy Panh, 26 July 2010. 227 Zoe Murphy, “Chum Mey: Tuol Sleng Survivor.” BBC News, 26 July 2010. Online 27 July 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10602689?print=true 228 Panh, “Cambodia: A Wound That Will Not Heal.” 229 Spencer Nakasako, “Director’s Commentary,” Refugee (Oakland: Vietnamse Youth Development Workshop, 2003). 377 230 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9. 231 Logos is described as “discourse”, speech, father (78-81). Logos also represents the father— chief, capital, goods (81). “For only the the ‘living’ discourse, only a spoken word (and not a speech’s theme, object or subject) can have a father . . . “ (78). 232 Felman and Laub. Testimony, p. 117. 233 Ibid., 248-250; italics mine. 234 Patricia Yeager, Consuming Trauma; or, the Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” from Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw, eds. Extremities: Trauma, Testimony and Community (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 28-29. 235 Alexander, Jeffrey C., et al., eds., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2004), pp. 68-169. 236 Vann Nath, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge’s S-21 (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 1998), p. 117. 237 From the Mith Samlanh website: “In order to increase Mith Samlanh’s sustainability and to provide former street youth more opportunities for their futures, Mith Samlanh runs a range of income generating activities. They include: training businesses where students from the Vocational Training Center gain experience in a real business environment; social businesses where parents are provided with income generation support so that they can send their children to school rather than to work in the streets. These activities are also income generation ventures with profits used to fund other projects and contribute to the purchase of Mith Samlanh’s main center. Mith Samlanh is able to fund 44 per cent of its own financial needs directly from the income from these business ventures.” http://www.mithsamlanh.org. 238 Conversation with the artist, Phnom Penh, November 2009. 239 Moore, p.12. 240 Invterview with the artist at his home and private gallery, Mutrak Gallery, October 3, 2010. 241 Author interview with the artist at his studio in Boeung Kak, Phnom Penh, 25 November 2009. 242 Interview with Anne Moore, “Flowers Come from My Mouth” essay in the Leang Seckon exhibition catalogue (London: Rossi & Rossi), 2009. 243 Interview with the artist, October 3, 2010. 244 Tara Shaw-Jackson’s introductory interview with the artist, Rossi&Rossi catalogue, 2009. 378 245 Ibid. 246 Ibid. 247 Human Rights Watch Cambodia country profile outlines government censorship: Media defamation cases are no longer covered by the penal code but by Cambodia's 1995 press law, which does not carry criminal liability or imprisonment as a penalty. During 2009 at least 10 government critics were prosecuted for criminal defamation and disinformation based on complaints by government and military officials. Among those convicted were four journalists, two of whom were jailed on disinformation charges: opposition editor Hang Chakra, sentenced to one year's imprisonment in June, and journalist Ros Sokhet, sentenced to two years' imprisonment in November. In July editor Dam Sith closed Moneaksekar Khmer, one of Cambodia's oldest opposition papers, as the only way to prevent government lawsuits that could have landed him in prison. Criminal defamation, disinformation, and incitement lawsuits were also filed against opposition Sam Rainsy Party (SRP) members, including party leader Sam Rainsy, SRP parliamentarians Mu Sochua and Ho Vann, and SRP youth activist Soung Sophorn. Prime Minister Hun Sen pressed defamation charges against the lawyer defending SRP cases, spurring the lawyer's withdrawal from the cases in July. As a result, Mu Sochua lacked legal counsel during her July 24 trial, in which she was found guilty of defaming the prime minister and ordered to pay US$4,100 in fines and compensation. Online 11 September 2010: http://www.hrw.org/en/node/87393 248 Interview with Leang Seckon, artist’s studio, Phnom Penh, November 2009. 249 Figures can be misleading. The World Bank’s “Doing Business” report ranks Cambodia 145 out of 158 countries. The World Economic Forum has a different ranking: Cambodia is ranked #109 out of 138 countries for business climate, barring Myanmar and Burma, countries not included on the survey. The rankings are based on the following factors: “The forum’s annual competitiveness study scores 110 factors across 12 areas affecting an economy’s business climate: institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic environment, health, education, goods and labour market efficiency, financial market development, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication, and innovation.” 250 Moore, catalogue, p. 13. 251 Author interview with artist, November 2009. 252 For more information on the Tonlé Sap, see www.tonlesap.net. 253 According to the International Money Fund, foreign direct investment in 2004 $340 million totaled $2.6 billion, up from. 379 254 “Cambodia's Economy in 2010: After Unusual Year, Is Recovery on its Way for Workers and Entrepreneurs?” http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/node/2858 255 Currently the average monthly wage for garment workers is US$56 a month. Prak Chan Tul, “Cambodian Workers Strike, Seek Higher Wages.” Reuters, 13 September 2010. Online 17 September 2010: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSGE67U09320100913 256 Mom Kunthear. “Mass Collapse at Garment Factory.” Phnom Penh Post. 24 August 2011. 257 Tep Nimol and Vincent MacIsaac. “H&M in Second Mass Faint.” Phnom Penh Post. 26 August 2011. 258 For an insightful discussion of Hồng-An Trương’s Adaptation Fever, please refer to the online artist interview by Võ Hồng Chương-Đài: www.dvanonline.org. Links to Trương’s work can be found on her website: Adaptation Fever: http://hongantruong.com/index.php?/projects/adaptation-fever/ Furniture to Aid in the Viewing of The Lover: http://hongantruong.com/index.php?/projects/furniture-to-aid-in-the-viewing-of-the-lover/ 260 lê thi diem thúy’s explores family, memory, and colonial representation in her performance piece Carte Postale. Personal discussion with the author, April 18, 2010, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 261 For more on diasporic identity and experimental videos including the practice of Ming Yuen S. Ma, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nguyễn Tân Hoàng, see Glen Mimura’s Ghostlife of Third Cinema (University of Minnesota, 2009). 262 In the United States, California (418,249), followed by Texas (107,027) comprise the most number of Vietnamese living abroad. The third group includes Vietnamese studying and working in the Soviet bloc who remained after the end of the Soviet union. The fourth group includes recent economic migrant workers who work in regional Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan. This group also includes Vietnamese mail order brides who live in South Korea and Taiwan. Elizabeth Grieco, Migration Policy Institute, “The Foreign Born From Vietnam in the United States” . http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=19 Online May 1, 2008. 263 A PBS documentary and images of An-My Lê’s work can be found on the PBS website: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/le/index.html. A discussion of Đỉnh Q. Lê and An-My Lê’s work appears in the transPOP: Korea Việt Nam Remix catalogue. Jun Nguyễn-Hatsushiba is represented by Lehman Maupin Gallery in New York: http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/#/artists/jun-nguyen-hatsushiba. 264 Simon Leung’s 1996 solo exhibition at Pat Hearn Gallery in New York entitled Call to Glory…Or Afternoon Tea with Duchamp pays dual tribute to Duchamp and glory holes. For more, please refer to the following online reviews and links: 380 http://www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/reviews/kley/kley7-26-96.asp; http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/19/arts/art-in-review-096644.html 265 This line is from William Butler Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer . . . Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .” 266 This is an inexact translation of the French woman’s narrative: “He’s stripped me naked, this is what I wanted. I desired him more than anything else. I couldn’t help but look for him. I couldn’t help but do otherwise . . . I wanted to disappear in his gaze until I disappeared myself . . . The sheets were soaked with blood . . .We were lying in bed smoking cigarettes . . .” A heartfelt thanks to Professor David Picard for his help with French translation. 267 I borrow this term from W.E.B. DuBois, coined in his text, The Souls of Black Folk. “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self . . .” Excerpted from the chapter "Of Our Spiritual Strivings"(italics mine). 268 Italics mine. 270 See Panivong Norindr, Phantasmic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film and Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, p. 13. 271 For more on American filmic representations of the Việt Nam War, see Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 272 See Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. “The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment... The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding..." (aphorism 4). 273 Jean Armour Polly coined this term. http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/timeline.asp 274 “The Conscience of Nhem Em,” is a 2009 Oscar-nominated HBO documentary by John Ozaki. 275 For more on Cambodia’s past and present, including current country statistics (GDP, etc..), see “Background Note: Cambodia”: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2732.htm. Online 26 September 2010. 381 276 Cheang Sokha, “ASEAN to Consider Border Talks.” Phnom Penh Post, 19 August 2010. 277 Viêt Nam News Agency, 5 December 2009. 278 Conversation with the artist December 2007. 279 Cambodia Cultural Profile: http://www.culturalprofiles.net/cambodia/Directories/Cambodia_Cultural_Profile/-1792.html 280 “Two Foreign Companies Investing in Boeung Kok Lake Area Withdraw,” Khmer Machas Srok, Vol.4, #629, 18 March 2010. 281 The World Bank’s Inspection March 31, 2010 memo can be downloaded here: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTINSPECTIONPANEL/Resources/CAM_LMAP- FinalEligRep_March31.pdf. Online 31 September 2010. 282 Describing the formal complaint filed against the World Bank, BiC notes “It alleges that the Bank breached its operational policies by failing to adequately supervise the Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP), which has denied urban poor and other vulnerable households due process rights and protection against increasing land-grabbing and forced evictions in Cambodia.” 283 Bank Information Center (BiC) Press Release, “World Bank agrees to full investigation into land activities in Cambodia,” 28 April 2010. According to its website the Bank Information Center “partners with civil society in developing and transition countries to influence the World Bank and other international financial institutions to promote social and economic justice and ecological sustainability.” http://www.bicusa.org 284 World Bank “About Us”: www.worldbank.org. 285 Personal conversation, October 2, 2010. 286 Interview with the artist, Baitong Restaurant, October 2, 2010. 287 The Cambodia Development Watch June 2010 report can be downloaded here: http://www.ngoforum.org.kh/eng/dip/olddipdocs/DPP_CambodiaDevelopmentWatchJune07Fin al_English.pdf 288 The Cambodia Development Watch states in their June 2010 report: . . . Later the MPP [Municipality of Phnom Penh ] announced that a private construction company named 7NG has proposed a plan to the MPP for providing alternative housing for thousands of residents due to be evicted from Phnom Penh’s Boeung Kak area1. According to the proposed plan the families will be allowed to stay at current location for 4 years and will pay US$ 0.64/day/family for four years to the company as a deposit amount. After four years, the families will move to new houses and will pay an additional US$0.42/day/family for six years and subsequently get the ownership of the house. The total costs of the new house will therefore amount to US$ 1,854 measured in 2007 prices. The alternate housing are said to be composed of 20m x 5m lots but there is no detail available about the location of the housing lots. The new 382 housing will be provided with a road, electricity, water, sewage system, a school, a hospital and a pagoda according to the proposal. A representative of 7NG said his company is currently working with MPP on a project involving more than 1000 ha of land which will be used to provide affordable housing for the poor. 289 Artist statement, Silence and Cycle. Italics mine. 290 Italics mine. 292 Despite difficult relations with Thailand, the country supplies a part of Cambodia’s electricity. In 2009, “the Kingdom purchased 226.76 billion kilowatt-hours from Thailand for US$19 million, and 500.74 billion kWh from Vietnam for $40 million, according to Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy data.” May Kunmakara. “Hun Sen Asks Vietnam to Supply More Power.” Phnom Penh Post. 19 March 2010. 293 Vietnam Business News states, “Turnover reached US$862 million in the first half of this year, including US$728 million from Vietnamese exports, up 34.2 percent from the same period last year.” 6 August 2010. Online: http://vietnambusiness.asia/vietnam-becomes- cambodia%E2%80%99s-third-largest-investor/ 294 Among the 26 points of discussion included the prohibition of double taxes to improve trade between the two countries, Vietnamese 100 long-term and 460 short-term scholarships for Cambodians, plans for controlling agricultural pests and so on. Kampuchea Thmey, Vol.8, #2117, 6-7 December 2009. 295 The paper notes that most of the travel to Việt Nam is for medical, not touristic, purposes. It also states that “Ho Chi Minh City attracted most Cambodian tourists, other areas such as the highland in the central area, the Mekong low lying area, and southeast provinces followed. Ho Chi Minh City attracted from 60% to 70% of the 117,000 Khmer tourists.” Rasmei Kampuchea, Vol.18, #5285, 25 August 2010. 296 Kampuchea Thmey, Vol.8, #2117, 6-7 December 2009. 297 However, the FAO states that “only about 20 percent of the land is arable. There are 3.6 million malnourished people in the country, or 26 percent of the population.” Site: http://www.fao.org/countries/55528/en/khm/ Online 15 October 2010. 298 Special thanks to Phan Quang, Quỳnh Phạm, Tùng Mai and Thư Vũ for their help with this section of the chapter. All quotes from the artist are from Quỳnh Phạm’s written correspondence with Phan Quang, August 2010. 299 Moira Roth writes eloquently about Đỉnh Q. Lê’s project Một Cõi Đi Về (Spending One’s Life Trying to Find One’s Way Home) in an Art Journal essay entitled “Obdurate History: Đỉnh Q. Lê, the Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory.” 383 300 The April 1, 2009 census shows that the Vietnamese population is 85.8 million people. The completed results will be announced September 2010. Mr. Đỗ Thức, GSO Deputy Director- General, Standing Member of the Central Steering Committee reported: By 00:00 April 1, 2009, Vietnam had 85,789,573 million people, of which 25,374,262 persons were residing in urban areas, accounting for 29.6% of the total; and 43,307,024 were women, with a sex-ratio of 98.1 men per 100 women. - Vietnam’s population increased by 9.47 million, at an annual population growth rate of 1.2 percent in mid period of two censuses of 1999 and 2009, decreasing fast as compared to period 1989-1999. - This rate was different among provinces, especially for regions with high economic growth. General Statistics Office of Việt Nam. Online: http://www.gso.gov.vn/default_en.aspx?tabid=462&idmid=2&ItemID=9198. In comparison, the 1999 Việt Nam census states that the population is about 76,323,173. Online: http://www.gso.gov.vn/default_en.aspx?tabid=476&idmid=4&ItemID=1841. 301 There is an annual conference on Việt Nam hosted by the Australian National University which focuses on political economy and socio-economic change. The 2009 session, held in Canberra, Australia, was called Vietnam Update: Migration Nation. 302 For more on Byron Kim’s recent practice, see Hosfelt Gallery: http://hosfeltgallery.com/index.php?p=artists&a=Byron%20Kim 303 According to the U.S. Department of State, the breakdown of Việt Nam’s economy is as follows: Agriculture, forestry, and fisheries (20.7% of GDP, 2009): Principal products--rice, coffee, cashews, maize, pepper (spice), sweet potato, pork, peanut, cotton, plus extensive aquaculture of both fish and shellfish species. Cultivated land--12.2 million hectares. Land use--21% arable; 28% forest and woodland; 51% other. Industry and construction (40.3% of GDP, 2009): Principal types--mining and quarrying, manufacturing, electricity, gas, water supply, cement, phosphate, and steel. Services (39.1% of GDP, 2009): Principal types--tourism, wholesale and retail, repair of vehicles and personal goods, hotel and restaurant, transport storage, telecommunications. Trade (2009): Exports--$56.6 billion (first quarter 2010: $14.0 billion). Principal exports--crude oil, garments/textiles, footwear, fishery and seafood products, rice (world’s second-largest exporter), pepper (spice; world’s largest exporter), wood products, coffee, rubber, handicrafts. Major export partners--U.S., EU, Japan, China, Australia, Singapore, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Web. 18 August 2010. :< http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/4130.htm>. 304 The March 3, 2010 China Economic Review states: According to figures from the National Bureau of Statistics, urban per capita income was US$2,525 against rural per capita net income of US$754 . . . Government researchers have warned that effective measures must be taken in the coming years to narrow the difference between the rich and the poor in order to maiintain social cohesion. This is in contrast to the latest report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which 384 concluded that the gap between the rich and the poor in China was decreasing thanks to increased welfare spending and major adjustments to the labor market for reducing disparities. Web. 18 August 2010. <http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/dailybriefing/2010_03_03/China_urban- rural_income_gap_widest_in_32_years.html>. 305 China’s ranking as the world’s second largest economy can be misleading: “In news conferences, on talk shows and in editorial pages, commentators have hastened to pooh-pooh the statistics, saying they are wrong, misleading or meaningless. They compare China not to Japan or the United States, but to Albania — both have annual per capita income of about $3,600.” Los Angeles Times, Friday, 20 August 2010. 307 See Tina M. Gammelot, “Figures of Transversality: State Power and Prenatal Screening in Contemporary Vietnam,” American Ethnologist, Volume 35, No. 4, pp. 570-587. 308 The 2009 population census is currently underway. The 86 million population estimate (2008) is from the CIA World Factbook. The 1999 Việt Nam census states that the population is about 76,323,173. Online: http://www.gso.gov.vn/default_en.aspx?tabid=476&idmid=4&ItemID=1841. 309 Việt Nam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development reports that in the first six months of 2009, Vietnam exported 3.8 million tones of rice, earning $1.8 billion. Commodity Online. 29 June 2009. Online 18 July 2009 http://www.commodityonline.com/news/Vietnam- rice-exports-rise-by-25-percent-19083-3-1.html. 310 I quote at length a 2008 Reuters article by Martha Graybow: A U.S. District Court judge in Brooklyn, New York ruled in March 2005 that the plaintiffs failed to show that use of agent orange, a plant killer supplied to the U.S. military in Vietnam, violated a ban on the use of poisonous weapons in war and that the lawsuit did not prove the plaintiffs' health problems were linked to the chemical. Although the herbicide campaign may have been controversial, the record before us supports the conclusion that agent orange was used as a defoliant and not as a poison designed for or targeting human populations," Judge Roger Miner wrote for the three-judge appeals court panel. The court also upheld two other agent orange rulings, including one in a case that was brought by veterans and their families who said their health problems did not become apparent until after a 1984 class-action settlement was reached with a group of veterans. In that case, the Second Circuit found that, as government contractors, the chemical companies could be shielded from liability . . . The plaintiffs had sought class-action status for millions of Vietnamese people in a case that, if successful, could have resulted in billions of dollars in damages and the costs of environmental cleanup in Vietnam. 311 Select exhibitions featuring Damaged Gene include Slew Release (Bishopsgate Goodsyard, London, 1999), humor us (Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles, 2008) and Agent 385 Orange: Landscape, Body, Image (Califoria Museum of Photography, University of California, Riverside, 2009). 312 I refer to Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin’s essay discusses the role of mass media and mass reproduction in shattering an original artwork’s “aura” (reverence and awe experienced in the presence of an original work of art). Now the artwork is endlessly reproduced, allowing for revolutionary potential: "Instead of being based on ritual, [art] begins to be based on another practice - politics." 313 In their essay “Nostalgia without Pain” Laura B. Kennedy and Mary Rose Williams looks at the packaging of tourism towards first-world (Western) foreigners in Việt Nam. They posit that although all tourist development must be state-sanctioned, the state has largely ceded the process of image-making to international developers who are hawking visions of premodern Edenic tours of rural areas as well as invoking a nostalgic French neo-colonial past at luxury hotels in urban areas in which locals are submissive servants. 314 “China Provides Aid for Infrastructure.” Kampuchea Thmey, Vol.8, #2075, 18-19 October 2009. 315 Artist Harrell Fletcher has rephotographed the images from the War Remnants Museum for a traveling photographic series commenting on historical representation and appropriation. 316 Phnom Penh Post, November 23, 2010. 317 www.saveboeungkak.com , accessed February 12, 2011. 318 Khouth Sophakchakrya, “Lakeside Families Homeless,” Phnom Penh Post. January 16, 2011. Online February 7, 2011 http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2011011646107/National- news/lakeside-families-homeless.html. 319 Sopheng Cheang, “Cambodia: Festival Stampede Kills At Least 345,” Associated Press. November 23, 2010. http://www.3news.co.nz/Cambodia-Festival-stampede-kills-at-least-345- PHOTOS/tabid/417/articleID/187516/Default.aspx. Online February 7, 2011.

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Creator Lê, Việt Hồ (author)

Core Title Return engagement: contemporary art's traumas of modernity and history in diasporic Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2011-12

Publication Date 12/12/2013

Defense Date 09/29/2011

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Asian American studies,Cambodia,contemporary visual art,development,diaspora,history,modernity,OAI-PMH Harvest,Southeast Asia,trauma,Vietnam,visual culture

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Advisor Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee chair), Roman, David (committee chair), Gómez-Barris, Macarena (committee member), Hoskins, Janet A. (committee member)

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