Đỗ Huyền My
(Sagittarius)
Điều hành viên
The Subtle Culture of Vietnam
By HOLLAND COTTER
NYT, 03/14
For many Americans who came of age before or during the 1960's, Vietnam was the name of a place you didn't want to go to. Its identity began and ended as a war zone. Even today the prevailing impression of the Southeast Asian country seems to be a composite of remembered news clips and scenes from "Apocalypse Now."
The West had a comparably one-dimensional view of Japan after World War II. And as time passed, the view changed. It grew broader, friendlier and complicated, closer to reality. More than a quarter-century after the Tet offensive and My Lai, the image of Vietnam is due for similar revision, or at least that is the basic idea behind "Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit," which opens tomorrow at the American Museum of Natural History.
Organized in collaboration with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi, this is not a historical show in the strict sense. The only archaeological artifact is a small terra cotta pot, dated around A.D. 500; a single discreet photographic image is the only document of the American war. The exhibition is a lavishly illustrated anthropological field trip through Vietnam today, which inevitably includes glimpses of the Vietnam of yesterday and tomorrow.
Indeed, the past is apparent everywhere, but indirectly, embodied in old but dynamic popular traditions and in the ephemeral artifacts they continue to generate. A blend of fact, myth, need and collective will, these traditions address fundamental human experiences — birth, marriage, death — and together add up to what is sometimes called national culture.
National culture is an amorphous, porous, not to say chimerical concept; Vietnam's no more or less than any other's. The country, a long rope of land about the size of New Mexico, is made up of 54 ethnic groups, most quite small, speaking almost as many languages. Over the centuries, foreign powers — China, Cambodia, France, England, Japan, the United States — have come and gone, leaving their cultural mark. Various immigrant groups have been absorbed, mixing with an indigenous population.
One way to get a sense of the resulting complexity is to look at Vietnamese religion, a synchretic, multifaceted phenomenon that includes elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, with late-arriving Christianity and Islam folded in. The proportion of ingredients varies from group to group, but spiritual events of some kind, whether religious or social, public or private, are a fact of daily life.
The exhibition, its route twisting through galleries on the museum's first floor like the coils of a dragon's tail, is conceived as a journey from one such event to the next, starting with customs surrounding the lunar New Year or Tet. A video, filmed in the streets of Hanoi in 2001, catches the buzz of preparations: shops spill over with special foods and ornaments; bicyclists transport auspicious orange and flowering peach trees from surrounding farms. At night, fireworks light up the sky.
In the homes of the Kinh or Viet people, the country's ethnic majority, ancestral altars, like the formidable example in the show, are piled high with sweets, fruits, incense and ceramic jars, locally made in antique styles, to coax familial spirits back for a holiday meal.
Just as New Year festivities mark a passage in civic time, other practices begin and end phases of an individual's life. The exhibition devotes a section to a teenage boy's initiation into adulthood in the northern Yao minority; the rite culminates in the boy's climbing a ladder and, in a classic test of psychological trust, falling backward into a net held by ritual masters.
Like many ceremonies, this one is accompanied by custom-made objects: vividly colored and annotated narrative scrolls and deity portraits. Once painted by the ritual masters themselves, such images are now produced in commercial workshops. And even with the current Vietnamese government's support of ethnic traditions, in the interests of nationalist solidarity and tourism, the exact meanings of their inscriptions are being forgotten.
Another, more common rite of passage, marriage, is fraught with protocols of status and etiquette, which differ in details from one ethnic group to another, as do rituals surrounding death. In Kinh funerals mourners wear outfits that signify their precise familial relationship to the deceased, and burn paper objects — ingeniously made versions of everyday things like dress suits, motorbikes and houses — as offerings.
People of the Thai minority erect funerary "trees" to launch the dead toward heaven. Hindu Cham people conduct elaborate cremation ceremonies. The Giarai people of the central highlands set up mortuary houses surrounded by carved wooden figures, including those of monkeys, an animal believed to rule in the ancestral realm that is the afterlife.
Certain ancestors are public celebrities and treated as such. An image of the deified military hero Ly Phuc Man is carried out of his temple in procession each year on a lacquer and gilt palanquin. The life and valiant times of other mythical and historical personalities are recounted in the water puppet plays performed at the annual Chua Thay festival in northern Vietnam. A religion of mother goddesses is populated by a United Nations of divine beings, including Buddhas, Chinese-style mandarins and the goddesses themselves, who seem to be native to Vietnam.
A ritual called Len Dong, associated with the mother goddess cult, is thought to bring material prosperity and has proved particularly popular in the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the market economy, introduced to the country in the 1980's. The performers are female shamans or mediums who invoke entire heavenly armies on behalf of the petitioners, embodying an array of male and female spirits, while their celestial steeds, made of paper, are burned as votive offerings.
The exhibition itself ends as it began, with a grand public occasion, in this case the Mid-Autumn Festival. Once a harvest celebration, it is now treated as a children's holiday, a cross between Halloween and Christmas, with shops selling toys and masks. Some toys are still individually produced from paper and wood; most are mass-produced from plastic in China. And while masks depict traditional figures from Vietnamese folklore, they also include Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and Japanese anime characters, staples of the global market.
Vietnam itself is now a regular stop on the international tourist beat, attracting visitors in search of exotic sights and handmade goods. And the exhibition itself — organized by Laurel Kendall, a curator in the department of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, and Nguyen Van Huy, director of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology — is unabashedly market-friendly, as many museum exhibitions are today.
The installation design by David Harvey is as alluring as a travel poster. The version of Vietnam it frames appears to be socially and politically trouble-free. The promotional mood extends to the presence of a large gift shop of Vietnamese wares in the museum's lobby — you pass through it on the way to the show — and a cafe serving native foods. (The museum's chief chef, as it happens, has a passion for Vietnamese cuisine.)
It is interesting to note that the gift shop is not so different in visual effect from the display of masks and toys that concludes the show, and which in turn closely echoes earlier displays of very different materials: the paper mortuary offerings, the deity portraits, the eye-catching items arranged on the family altar. The inescapable suggestion is that all these objects are, at some level, trinkets and toys, and that culture itself, high and low, religious or secular, is a form of play, of make-believe, a glittering theater of costumes and props.
The idea is an intriguing one, and it has produced an absorbing museum experience. Yet it leaves nagging issues unaddressed, and Vietnam itself at a curious distance. Possibly because the subject of the show — an entire country — is so huge, we never get a concrete sense of contemporary life: of how, for example, young people, a huge segment of Vietnam's population, conceive of their place in the international picture. Are they really committed to reviving and sustaining traditions, or are they engaged in creating different cosmopolitan cultures of their own, as some contemporary Vietnamese art, seen in several New York gallery shows this month, suggests? And do traditions mask or heal the disruptions of the recent past, which go largely unmentioned here?
These are the kinds of questions that actually make a study of any nation and culture provocative. They will surely be on the minds of many visitors to the show in New York, and they leave one wondering how it will be received when it travels to Hanoi in 2005. To be fair, the curators state at the outset that their focus is in other directions, on other things, and that's fine. But what results is a portrait of Vietnam that, while rich, dense and in many ways revelatory, is in the end more confectionary than it might have been.
By HOLLAND COTTER
NYT, 03/14
For many Americans who came of age before or during the 1960's, Vietnam was the name of a place you didn't want to go to. Its identity began and ended as a war zone. Even today the prevailing impression of the Southeast Asian country seems to be a composite of remembered news clips and scenes from "Apocalypse Now."
The West had a comparably one-dimensional view of Japan after World War II. And as time passed, the view changed. It grew broader, friendlier and complicated, closer to reality. More than a quarter-century after the Tet offensive and My Lai, the image of Vietnam is due for similar revision, or at least that is the basic idea behind "Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind and Spirit," which opens tomorrow at the American Museum of Natural History.
Organized in collaboration with the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi, this is not a historical show in the strict sense. The only archaeological artifact is a small terra cotta pot, dated around A.D. 500; a single discreet photographic image is the only document of the American war. The exhibition is a lavishly illustrated anthropological field trip through Vietnam today, which inevitably includes glimpses of the Vietnam of yesterday and tomorrow.
Indeed, the past is apparent everywhere, but indirectly, embodied in old but dynamic popular traditions and in the ephemeral artifacts they continue to generate. A blend of fact, myth, need and collective will, these traditions address fundamental human experiences — birth, marriage, death — and together add up to what is sometimes called national culture.
National culture is an amorphous, porous, not to say chimerical concept; Vietnam's no more or less than any other's. The country, a long rope of land about the size of New Mexico, is made up of 54 ethnic groups, most quite small, speaking almost as many languages. Over the centuries, foreign powers — China, Cambodia, France, England, Japan, the United States — have come and gone, leaving their cultural mark. Various immigrant groups have been absorbed, mixing with an indigenous population.
One way to get a sense of the resulting complexity is to look at Vietnamese religion, a synchretic, multifaceted phenomenon that includes elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, with late-arriving Christianity and Islam folded in. The proportion of ingredients varies from group to group, but spiritual events of some kind, whether religious or social, public or private, are a fact of daily life.
The exhibition, its route twisting through galleries on the museum's first floor like the coils of a dragon's tail, is conceived as a journey from one such event to the next, starting with customs surrounding the lunar New Year or Tet. A video, filmed in the streets of Hanoi in 2001, catches the buzz of preparations: shops spill over with special foods and ornaments; bicyclists transport auspicious orange and flowering peach trees from surrounding farms. At night, fireworks light up the sky.
In the homes of the Kinh or Viet people, the country's ethnic majority, ancestral altars, like the formidable example in the show, are piled high with sweets, fruits, incense and ceramic jars, locally made in antique styles, to coax familial spirits back for a holiday meal.
Just as New Year festivities mark a passage in civic time, other practices begin and end phases of an individual's life. The exhibition devotes a section to a teenage boy's initiation into adulthood in the northern Yao minority; the rite culminates in the boy's climbing a ladder and, in a classic test of psychological trust, falling backward into a net held by ritual masters.
Like many ceremonies, this one is accompanied by custom-made objects: vividly colored and annotated narrative scrolls and deity portraits. Once painted by the ritual masters themselves, such images are now produced in commercial workshops. And even with the current Vietnamese government's support of ethnic traditions, in the interests of nationalist solidarity and tourism, the exact meanings of their inscriptions are being forgotten.
Another, more common rite of passage, marriage, is fraught with protocols of status and etiquette, which differ in details from one ethnic group to another, as do rituals surrounding death. In Kinh funerals mourners wear outfits that signify their precise familial relationship to the deceased, and burn paper objects — ingeniously made versions of everyday things like dress suits, motorbikes and houses — as offerings.
People of the Thai minority erect funerary "trees" to launch the dead toward heaven. Hindu Cham people conduct elaborate cremation ceremonies. The Giarai people of the central highlands set up mortuary houses surrounded by carved wooden figures, including those of monkeys, an animal believed to rule in the ancestral realm that is the afterlife.
Certain ancestors are public celebrities and treated as such. An image of the deified military hero Ly Phuc Man is carried out of his temple in procession each year on a lacquer and gilt palanquin. The life and valiant times of other mythical and historical personalities are recounted in the water puppet plays performed at the annual Chua Thay festival in northern Vietnam. A religion of mother goddesses is populated by a United Nations of divine beings, including Buddhas, Chinese-style mandarins and the goddesses themselves, who seem to be native to Vietnam.
A ritual called Len Dong, associated with the mother goddess cult, is thought to bring material prosperity and has proved particularly popular in the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the market economy, introduced to the country in the 1980's. The performers are female shamans or mediums who invoke entire heavenly armies on behalf of the petitioners, embodying an array of male and female spirits, while their celestial steeds, made of paper, are burned as votive offerings.
The exhibition itself ends as it began, with a grand public occasion, in this case the Mid-Autumn Festival. Once a harvest celebration, it is now treated as a children's holiday, a cross between Halloween and Christmas, with shops selling toys and masks. Some toys are still individually produced from paper and wood; most are mass-produced from plastic in China. And while masks depict traditional figures from Vietnamese folklore, they also include Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and Japanese anime characters, staples of the global market.
Vietnam itself is now a regular stop on the international tourist beat, attracting visitors in search of exotic sights and handmade goods. And the exhibition itself — organized by Laurel Kendall, a curator in the department of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, and Nguyen Van Huy, director of the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology — is unabashedly market-friendly, as many museum exhibitions are today.
The installation design by David Harvey is as alluring as a travel poster. The version of Vietnam it frames appears to be socially and politically trouble-free. The promotional mood extends to the presence of a large gift shop of Vietnamese wares in the museum's lobby — you pass through it on the way to the show — and a cafe serving native foods. (The museum's chief chef, as it happens, has a passion for Vietnamese cuisine.)
It is interesting to note that the gift shop is not so different in visual effect from the display of masks and toys that concludes the show, and which in turn closely echoes earlier displays of very different materials: the paper mortuary offerings, the deity portraits, the eye-catching items arranged on the family altar. The inescapable suggestion is that all these objects are, at some level, trinkets and toys, and that culture itself, high and low, religious or secular, is a form of play, of make-believe, a glittering theater of costumes and props.
The idea is an intriguing one, and it has produced an absorbing museum experience. Yet it leaves nagging issues unaddressed, and Vietnam itself at a curious distance. Possibly because the subject of the show — an entire country — is so huge, we never get a concrete sense of contemporary life: of how, for example, young people, a huge segment of Vietnam's population, conceive of their place in the international picture. Are they really committed to reviving and sustaining traditions, or are they engaged in creating different cosmopolitan cultures of their own, as some contemporary Vietnamese art, seen in several New York gallery shows this month, suggests? And do traditions mask or heal the disruptions of the recent past, which go largely unmentioned here?
These are the kinds of questions that actually make a study of any nation and culture provocative. They will surely be on the minds of many visitors to the show in New York, and they leave one wondering how it will be received when it travels to Hanoi in 2005. To be fair, the curators state at the outset that their focus is in other directions, on other things, and that's fine. But what results is a portrait of Vietnam that, while rich, dense and in many ways revelatory, is in the end more confectionary than it might have been.
sao chán thế
