About 100 Protest Bowers Show Opening

Outside an art exhibit that has reignited anti-Communist passions in Orange County, Hao Nguyen told a story that immigrants have repeated time and again.

He and his wife came to the United States from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, five years ago for all sorts of things--for food, work, a good bed. But most importantly, he says, it was freedom that brought them to a country where they could speak their minds, where they could spend a warm Saturday afternoon on Main Street in Santa Ana and--without fear of prison--grind the red flag of Vietnam under their dirty shoes.

The flag is just cloth, red with a yellow star in the middle, but to Nguyen and his wife, An, and all the others there with them, it is a symbol of a corrupt bureaucracy. The couple sullied the flag all they could until it was almost torn. Hao Nguyen, 54, once a soldier in the former South Vietnam, said: “It feels good.”

The couple stood outside the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art with about 100 other people, mostly Vietnamese, protesting “A Winding River,” a traveling exhibit of Vietnamese paintings that opened to the public Saturday. The crowd of protesters was smaller than the 300 to 500 predicted by organizers and was dwarfed by the thousands who surged into Little Saigon to demonstrate against the display of a Vietnamese flag in a Bolsa Avenue video store earlier this year.

The exhibit itself attracted only 124 visitors by 4:30 p.m. despite the attention drawn in recent days by complaints from some in the local Vietnamese community that it amounts to propaganda for that nation’s Communist government.

The protest, which began at 10 a.m, lasted through the afternoon without violence or arrests. Demonstrators carried signs that read “Human Rights for Vietnam,” “Winding River is Propaganda” and “In Vietnam Communists use Forces. In America Communists use Art.”

Attorney Luan Tran, a protest organizer, attributed the low turnout to the museum’s distance from Little Saigon and to the subtle nature of the perceived threat. “This is a greater challenge for us because this is art,” not an overtly political display that would more readily enrage the public, he said.

But “what’s important is how we conducted ourselves and that we got our message across,” Tran said.

Bowers museum officials have said the reason they chose the exhibit was, in part, to serve Orange County’s Vietnamese emigre population of 200,000, the largest in the country. But many in that community responded angrily over what they saw as sympathetic depictions of Communist Vietnam. They also were angered by the fact that the museum reversed a decision to remove one of the pictures.

The exhibit’s insidious message “means a lot--a lot when you are from there,” Dung Dinh, 45, of Anaheim said. “This is an abuse. This is an abuse of free speech.”

Hung Nguyen was one of the first protesters to arrive at the Bowers Museum. He too stood on a Communist flag; he also carried a large black MIA/POW flag and wore on his chest a picture of a kneeling American POW about to be shot by two North Vietnamese soldiers. Twenty-four years after he was imprisoned in Saigon for belonging to a prosperous, capitalist family, Nguyen still seethes over how the prison guards nearly starved him. And the exhibit inside enraged him.

Critics say some paintings are explicitly propaganda: those that show soldiers or Communist emblems, like “Young Girl Forging Steel,” the painting that museum officials restored after complaints of censorship. Many protesters believe artists were forced by the Vietnamese government to create the paintings.

The pieces with no obvious political message are even worse, the protesters say. Even paintings of houses and trees and lovers and moonlight seem to ignore the suffering of those forced from their homes.

“We lived like animals, like cows! For three years I was in jail--until 1978--then I came here. They killed 58,000!” Nguyen said, referring to the U.S. soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. Pounding on his chest, on the picture of the kneeling soldier, he said, “Right now we need to support this guy!”

Inside the museum, the exhibit opening was marked only by strains of lilting Vietnamese music. The show was put together by Meridian International Center, a Washington, D.C-based nonprofit arts organization, and has toured the United States for 18 months. The drawings and paintings, chosen by an independent panel of American and Vietnamese art experts, include pieces from the 1930s to the 1990s. Most, however, were created in the last five years.

Many are of rural scenes--rain-swept roads, huddled children poring over books, a white house nestled in a blaze of red trees. In others, prewar Hanoi streets are painted in relentless grays and browns, and ancient Vietnamese lacquer techniques are melded to contemporary, abstract stylings. Beside each piece is a message from the artist. “I would like my art to be laconic and capable of arousing feelings among the viewers,” wrote artist Bao Toan Nguyen of a 1997 work.

From artist Thanh Chau Nguyen: “A work of art acts like a bridge between the artist who uses the power of visual expression and the viewer who reads it like a message.”

The exhibit’s message to visitor Tu Binh, 59, was that the Bowers Museum did not cave in to “mob pressure.” A Westminster resident and refugee from South Vietnam, Binh said he had been following news of the exhibit as it toured the country, eagerly waiting its arrival in Orange County. “Art must reflect the reality of the society, and the society in Vietnam is changing,” Binh said. “The war is over.”

His favorite piece showed the faint form of a couple off to the left in shadow. To their right was a child with a dove. To Binh the painting called upon the viewer to put the darkness of the war years behind. Even one of the pieces most infuriating to the demonstrators outside found favor with Binh. The painting shows a mother viewing rows of portraits of boy-soldiers who had died during the war.

Their caps bear the star of the North Vietnamese--none from the South are included. It is a sort of Vietnam War memorial with portraits instead of names. “Like the soldiers in the south, they died for their country,” Binh said. “They probably didn’t even know what communism was.”’