• Recommend on Facebook
• Tip on Hyves
• Share on Linkedin
• Tweet about it
• Tell a friend

Categories / Documentary Conceptual /Tags / Asia / documentary photography / Vietnam / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / Comments Off

Comments are closed.

During the last few years I have had the opportunity to continually return to Vietnam, crossing 
and re-crossing national and cultural boundaries. I was born there but left at the age of three. I’ve been interested in the globalism that is changing Vietnamese culture, the reconstruction of memory associated with the war, and a wider, ongoing need for either reconciliation or exotica that is fueling a tourism boom in a country that not long ago was a battlefield. The series portrays a newfound fascination with Vietnam as a destination not just for Western tourists, but also for intra-tourists who are traveling alongside backpackers and returning veterans. This work began through my own travels in Vietnam with my Vietnamese cousins, from whom I had been separated for thirty years. As members of the burgeoning middle class in Vietnam – wealth made possible by the movement of global capital – they dragged me to gaudy amusement parks that cater to locals with disposable income. As a wholly socialized American, I dragged them to places like Khe Sanh battlefield and China Beach. The pictures function as a record of the cultural signifiers of a new Vietnam, one where, in the words of one observer, “Technicolor playgrounds increasingly obscure the pallor of military green.” My cousins and I thought we knew which Vietnamese landscapes should have the most resonance for us and each other, but soon realized that those ideas were formed by faulty memories and partial histories. This tension of trying to imagine (or remember) Vietnam as a bloody battlefield or an Orientalist’s fantasia is fascinating to me, especially as almost all of the images are representations of manufactured fictions anyway: surreal themeparks inspired by native mythologies; or solemnly contrived, propagandized war monuments; or places that portray a Vietnamese interpretation of Western culture’s view of itself. The objects within the frame of view (temple ruins of an ancien regime, Beaux Arts-style buildings, rusty U.S. Army helicopters, European Union-financed monorail tracks) now play equal roles as statuary within the vista of the modern Vietnamese landscape. They come from different eras in the country’s history, but today their political or cultural significance has been conflated, diminished, or recontextualized. Ultimately they are made to serve multiple and often conflicting masters: traditional Confucianism/Buddhism, the ruling state communism, and the inexorable call of global capitalism.