Multiple Entry Visa
July 5 – 28, 2007
During the first decade of this century, I spent time living and photographing in Viet Nam. I had
arrived on a Fulbright, eager to see and interpret a country that, at the time, still had a hold on
American political, historical, and visual imaginations. I was born in Viet Nam and left as a
toddler; my flight out of Viet Nam represented the bifurcation of our family — and my cousins
—for more than twenty-five years.
Viet Nam’s grip on American culture is now seemingly looser: it’s like we’ve broken up with her,
replacing her embrace with Iraq and Afghanistan’s. Which is just as well, because since then,
she’s done fine. We needed her more than she needed us.
My Vietnamese cousins — those who never left to become hyphenated Americans, Canadians,
Europeans, or Australians — came of age in a country that has been, at a ferocious pace,
simultaneously razing and reconstructing, constantly renovating and rehabbing itself like one
would a house, painting over rooms built by the 20th-century socialist thought of Marx and Ho
Chi Minh and re-decorating them according to the latest designs of late stage capitalism.
The influx of international money — everything from $5-a-night backpacker hotels to billions in
direct foreign investment by multinational corporations — helped create a burgeoning middle
class of Vietnamese who, for the first time, could become both international and intra-tourists.
I accompanied my Vietnamese cousins to these sites of leisure. Some of these cousins, and
other Vietnamese and international tourists, too, collaborated with me in finding these places
and constructed how they wanted to be portrayed in the images.
The synthetic landscapes I photographed often resembled a truly wacky trip down the memory
lane of Vietnam’s history, one laid by the ancien régimes that have hybridized her: the dynastic
Chinese, the French mission civilisatrice, Henry Kissinger and 52,000 Americans, and now
global capital. You could visit Khe Sanh and China Beach; you could tour ochre Beaux-Arts
villas and crumbling riverside shophouses straight out of Marguerite Duras’ prose; you could
walk across quaint Chinese covered bridges lit by hanging silk lanterns: simulacra of what a
country thinks it should look like to an outside world that was “re-discovering” it.
Blue Sky exhibited these photographs in 2007. Many are documents of places that no longer
exist. Steel, glass, and helipads have replaced bamboo, concrete, and dirt, and I hope
someone else is now making new landscape photographs at these same sites and wondering,
as I had wondered, what was here before they built this.
Howard Henry Chen’s series titled Multiple Entry Visa are photographs taken in Vietnam which began while visiting family who stayed after the end of the American War. Chen’s preconceptions of which Vietnamese landscapes should have the most resonance evolved as he 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, an Orientalist’s fantasia, or a traveler’s playground fascinated the artist, 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. Australian-designed, E.U.-financed water parks cool down polyglot expat kids as they splash together on weekends. Ochre-hued walls of Indochine-style buildings never get painted, by design. Rusty U.S. Army helicopters put up as trophies are snubbed by those they are meant to awe. Once-neglected temple ruins of the Cham are re-built brick-by-brick – monuments of an ancient regime have morphed into magnets for middle class Chinese tourists from Shenzhen.