Shows Offer Sum to Think About

LAGUNA BEACH â€”  Sometimes things really do add up to more than the sum of their parts. Despite the mixed quality of the art, a trio of exhibitions about Vietnam at the Orange County Museum of Art’s Laguna Art Museum branch is well worth seeing because they build on one another.

If your image of Vietnam derives mostly from war footage on television, articles about American vets visiting the country for emotional closure or “boat people� recalling their escape, these shows offer other perspectives--the natural beauty, the aesthetic outlook and the everyday life of a country in the throes of social upheaval and massive economic restructuring.

The beauty part is shown through “Vietnam Through Vietnamese Eyes,� a group of silver gelatin photos by members of the Vietnamese Artistic Photographic Assn., with headquarters in Orange. Without looking at the labels, a viewer is often hard pressed to date these classically serene and delicately nuanced black-and-white images of people laboring within the voluptuous embrace of nature.

A sharply undulating sand dune dwarfing a lone peasant resembles a Constructivist sculpture in a 1974 photograph by Lai Huu Duc. The almost identical slanting silhouettes and reflections of two peasants working on a pale, flat salt field in the late 1960s or early ‘70s, in a photograph by Ton Lap, are at once compositionally elegant and suggestive of the endless repetition of agricultural work.

Even in “Rescue,� a tension-loaded image by Le Van Khoa (showing one American soldier carrying a wounded comrade while another crouches, alert for enemy movement), billowing smoke lends a dreamily disconnected atmospheric element.

Another photograph by Le, “Heading Toward the Whirlwind,� memorializes a breeze-blown vortex of sun-dappled branches that envelops a passing peasant. If a political subtext was intended (this work dates from 1972, a year of major war activity in both North and South Vietnam, including the mining of Haiphong Harbor), it was clothed in the most aesthetically sensitive response to patterns of climate and foliage.

Lai is nearly 80; Ton will be 70 next year, and Le is in his 60s. In their youth, when colonial French culture was layered over indigenous arts, Vietnamese art assumed ultra-refined yet often vacuous guises.

This wan French influence becomes clear in an accompanying exhibition, “An Ocean Apart: Contemporary Vietnamese Art From the United States and Vietnam,� in such works as Tran Van Can’s lacquer painting, “Tuning the Strings,� from 1943. Its decoratively curving lines and splotches of bright color illustrate a courtship ritual from a Vietnamese legend.

“An Ocean Apart� is an unsatisfying medley of works by 32 artists, organized by SITES (Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service) in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture in Hanoi.

On the positive side, the show conveys a certain overriding aesthetic outlook: a sense of restraint, an inherent gracefulness, an abiding preoccupation with nature in all its forms. Judged by Western standards--which is not unfair because these are artists whose training is overwhelming Western--some of the work is warmly appealing, if slight.

Few pieces are as exceptional, however, as Le Vuong’s richly detailed black-and-white photograph of an industrial site, “Mine at Long At.�

The loose, blurry brushwork of Ngo Quang Nam’s watercolor, “Peasants Going to Work,� makes the four anonymous figures with their burdens look as though they are buffeted by unseen elements.

The rhythmically simplified outlines of Nguyen Tu Nghiem’s small gouache, “Rooster and Hen,� recall the work of Chi’i Bai Shih, a major Chinese modernist whose subjects also are drawn from nature.

Though clearly indebted to Matisse, Dang Xuan Hoa’s “The Red Chair� pulses with vibrant incident and eccentric vision (eye shapes are scattered throughout the interior).

In an environment where standard art materials can be too costly to procure, artists devise creative substitutions. Nguyen Tuan Khanh combines paint with photocopied color illustrations. Le Thanh Tru uses clay as a print medium (because it is more malleable with bad tools than wood), yielding more atmospheric effects.

Still, even in work from the 1980s and early ‘90s, a pervasive traditionalism colors the art of Vietnam resident and American transplant alike.

Few seem as genuinely contemporary as Viet Ngo, who studied both art and civil engineering, and now lives in the United States. He designs subtle and harmonious environmental projects (represented by photographs in the show) for such far-flung places as Gorgonzola, Italy, and Devil’s Lake, N.D.

A text panel in the exhibition attempts to forestall an inevitable vein of criticism by warning that “without understanding [contemporary Vietnamese art’s] cultural lineage,� we are likely to see the work as “wan copies of Western modernism.�

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Indeed, some awareness of the impact of Western painting, the previous generation’s artisanal (as opposed to independently creative) approach to art-making and the revitalization of indigenous crafts may explain why the works look the way they do. But there is a School of Paris-derived blandness to so much of the work. Coupled with traditional lacquer painting’s emphasis on surface appeal, the works often look dated and lacking in substance.

Some works straightforwardly recall specific artistic styles of the past: Pham Dai’s ink drawings from 1991 look like a marriage between Arshile Gorky and Salvador Dali; Hoang Dang’s ritualistic figures in “Buffalo Killing Festival� evoke German Expressionist Emile Nolde.

Perhaps the most “contemporary�--in the sense of “open ended�--work is by Hien Duc Tran, a young Vietnamese who lives in Massachusetts. In his photographs of a group of young Amerasians--a generation viewed as pariahs--in Ho Chi Minh City, their faces register as many degrees of comparative “Asian-ness� or “American-ness� as flickering emotions.

In any case, it’s hard to put total faith in the SITES exhibit as a report on the state of contemporary art in Vietnam, for two reasons.

One is that this exhibition was organized in 1991 (rapid cultural change since then may well have produced fresher art forms). The other is that government officials concerned with promoting Vietnam industry and tourism may have rejected art that showed the country in a less-than-pleasing light. Still, you have to wonder how such flaccid work as Nguyen Thi Hop’s “Mother and Child� made the final cut.

The third show at the Laguna museum is “A Portrait of Vietnam,� a group of photographs by Lou Dematteis. His journalistic works are powered by obvious contrasts--either within a single shot (saffron-robed Buddhist monks begging next to a display of hi-fi equipment in Ho Chi Minh City) or between different photographs. Timeless scenes of rural agriculture contrast with urban views of such sights as trendy teens on a motor scooter.

The images add up to a somewhat scattershot notion of the country, a problem that might have been remedied by pointedly grouping them to emphasize the specific qualities of specific places (Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, different rural regions).

Dematteis’ most memorable photographs tend to be the more quietly emblematic ones: the elderly man sitting across from a display of missiles in Lenin Park, Hanoi; the dancing orphaned children with small, delicately ornamented drums hanging from their necks.

One thing you begin to grasp from this trio of shows is the importance of small, subtle things in the bigger picture of contemporary Vietnam.

* ‘An Ocean Apart: Contemporary Vietnamese Art from the United States and Vietnam,� “Vietnam Through Vietnamese Eyes� and “A Portrait of Vietnam: Lou Dematteis,� are on display through March 30 at the Laguna Art Museum, a site of the Orange County Museum of Art, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday. Admission: $5 adults, $4 seniors and students, children under 16 free. (714) 759-1122.