Tam Khoa Vu’s “Their Country”: Towards an Empowered Telling of Migrant Future
Written by Huirui Zhang
Edited by Nicolas Poblete and Paige Suhl
Artist Tam Khoa Vu (right) chatting with visitors at the exhibition.
Tam Khoa Vu’s “Their Country”: Towards an Empowered Telling of Migrant Future
An enormous swell forms on an open sea, engulfing a crowded raft (fig. 1). A wave swirls in front of a wall of waterfalls, waiting for a small boat (fig. 2). Their Country (2021), a new series by the Vietnamese-Canadian artist Tam Khoa Vu, was presented in Montréal at the Artch exhibition in September 2021. The two oil paintings in the series depict the perilous journey of the Vietnamese “boat people” from the Vietnam War in an American Realist style. They hang on a clean white wall, staged side-by-side like a pair of open windows, submerging viewers into allegorical scenes of sea venture (fig. 3). Across them, a series of archival photos from a family album is arranged linearly (fig. 4), drawing viewers’ eyes into reading a private history.
Figure 1. Khoa Vu, Tam. Their Country I: 100ft Waves. 2021. Oil paint on canvas with wood frame, 28" x 36". Painted in Vietnam, framed in Montreal.
Figure 2. Khoa Vu, Tam. Their Country II: Waves like a Wall. 2021. Oil paint on canvas with golden leaf frame, 28" x 36". Painted in Vietnam, framed in Montreal.
Figure 3. Khoa Vu, Tam. Installation View of Their Country I & II at Artch exhibition. 2021. Montréal.
Figure 4. Khoa Vu, Tam. Installation View of Family Album at Artch exhibition. 2021. Montréal.
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Inspired by this quote from Vietnamese-American novelist and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen, Khoa Vu created Their Country upon his family memory of fleeing the ruins of war from Vietnam to Canada in 1987. However, Their Country is more than a simple play of memory. As a second generation immigrant, the work visualizes a memory channeled through a layering of personal account: the direct account from the refugees (Khoa Vu’s mother and aunt), the imaginary account from the child (Khoa Vu himself) and the secondary account from the Vietnamese painter commissioned by Khoa Vu to create these paintings based on his instruction.
In this article, my discussion of Their Country will focus on the interplay of memory, history, and identity employed by the artist during his creation process. Through a unique approach of memory translation, I propose that Tam Khoa Vu’s Their Country produces a call for empowerment and collaborative storytelling in response to the global migration crisis.
To begin, I want to first situate Their Country back to its historical context—the “Boat-People Crisis.” In April 1975, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, fell to the communist forces. For the next twenty years, following the aftermath of the Vietnam War, thousands of Vietnamese who opposed the communist regime risked their lives on sea to escape harsh punishments. Starting in the late 1970s, the mass migration of Vietnamese refugees fleeing by tiny overcrowded boats came to be known as the “boat-people crisis.”1 Despite a short period of recovery implemented by the UN's Orderly Departure Program (ODP), the number of Vietnamese refugees increased again dramatically when Khoa Vu’s mother and aunt left Vietnam in 1987.2 Their journey, like that of the majority of Vietnamese refugees, was troubled by many obstacles and perils of the sea before they found permanent asylum in Canada. Under this light, Khoa Vu’s Their Country is an experiment of memory translation from the start. The familial memory Khoa Vu drew from his mother and aunt is a shared memory already processed and translated through the thousands of minds of the "boat people” and their families.
Figure 5. Khoa Vu, Tam. Pictorial Techpack Instruction for Their Country I: 100ft Waves. 2021. Photoshop Render. Montréal.
Figure 6. Khoa Vu, Tam. Study for Their Country II: Waves like a Wall. 2021. Photoshop Render. Montréal.
From History to Memory: A Time Travel
Moving away from history, the making of Their Country begins as an imitation of memory formation—Khoa Vu serves like a sensory register who gathered and packed his selected thoughts and perceptions of familial and cultural history into a compound instruction and sent to the “neuron,” a Vietnamese reproduction painter to process. Thus, Their Country is a new memory formulated and reshaped through the minds and hands of Khoa Vu and the Vietnamese reproduction painter.
There are two types of instruction sent by Khoa Vu. One is a photoshop render that Khoa Vu composed from a 1979 photoshoot of a refugee boat along with the 1939 painting Ground Swell by Edward Hopper, and a 2020 photograph of a surfer surfing in Mavericks Beach, California (fig. 5). The other is a brief text description that states: “please paint Frederic Edwin Church’s Niagara Falls, with a wave in it, and add a boat” (fig. 6). From a cross-reference of the mid-twentieth century artworks to a defined reference of the nineteenth-century masterpiece, a span of history is already cut and pasted like a collage to formulate a sense of memory-making carrying the maker through time.
In the heart of both instructions lies also a translation of Vietnamese diaspora context within the visual language of the landscape genre and American Realism. Although the choice of American Realist style is a passive one (because it was requested by the reproduction painter since he is most comfortable reproducing Realist works for other clients),3 the choice of Realism style fits Khoa Vu’s ultimate goal of memory translation from history. By replacing the original figures from the composition with “boat-people,” Khoa Vu brings the interpretation of the “boat-people crisis” from the late 1970s into a parallel discussion of a further past and an after future (the present).
Figure 7. Hopper, Edward. Ground Swell. 1939. Oil on canvas, 91.92 × 127.16 cm. Boston, National Gallery of Art.
In the painting on the left titled 100ft Waves, Khoa Vu merges the past and the present by integrating twentieth-century works into a 2020 photograph of sea swell surfing. The dark tone of the swell from the contemporary photograph is changed to a lighter hue of sky blue, mimicking the color scheme from Ground Swell (1939). Instead of a surfer, the cresting spray now splashed out in a foamy texture surrounding a wobbling raft loaded with refugees. The skin tone of these refugees remains black, as portrayed in the old 1979 monochrome photoshoot, while the body of the raft is painted in brown. The preservation of the black bodies in contrast with the vast ocean blue, emulates black and white vintage film tape in the process of being recoloured. If one calls back to the reading of the bell buoy in Edward Hopper’s Ground Swell (fig. 7), the lone dark element in the middle ground hints at an upcoming disaster over the horizon, which in Hopper’s time, indicated the prelude of WWII.4 Connecting this interpretation of Ground Swell to Khoa Vu’s 100ft Waves, one could see 100ft Waves as a warning in the same vein as Hopper’s, but at a fast-forward pace. What Khoa Vu wants to highlight through the shadowing figures on the boat is the actual happening of the predicted threat. The anticipation from 100ft Waves in the case of Their Country becomes a fear for the possible cost of life. The “boat-people crisis” from the past is turned into a crisis of life that viewers can co-experience with the depicted refugees on the boat at the very moment. Those shadowed bodies of the refugees are alive and lifeless simultaneously. On the one hand, they are spirits and ghosts of past refugees who lost their lives on sea. On the other hand, they inform viewers that the cost of life is a lingering price that present migrants continue to pay. The migration crisis has never truly ended.
Figure 8. Edwin Church, Frederic. Study for "Under Niagara". 1858. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 11.7" x 17.5". New York, Olana State Historic Site.
Figure 9. Edwin Church, Frederic. Niagara. 1857. 101.6 × 229.9 cm. Boston, National Gallery of Art.
In the painting on the right titled Waves like a Wall, the method of bringing the painting into a dialogue between the past and the present is different. Instead of directly merging elements of existing pictures from older periods, Khoa Vu deliberately requests Frederic Edwin Church’s painting of Niagara Falls from the nineteenth century as the background. He chose the lesser known Study for "Under Niagara” from 1858 (fig. 8) as the base reference over the ground-breaking Niagara (1857) Church made first (fig. 9). Both of Church’s Niagara paintings reveal the vista from the Canadian shore. However, Study for "Under Niagara” is a view from the foot of the falls compared to the aerial angle of Niagara that positioned viewers on the brink of the falls looking downwards. In this case, by placing the refugee boat at the bottom left of the foot of Niagara Falls, the viewer’s eyes are directed to gaze up and focus on the crashing waves spinning in the midst of the waterfalls. The wave forms a counter-clockwise arch, facing towards the refugee boat as if blocking the way and opening a pathway simultaneously. The shape of the unusual wave recalls a tunnel or even a time machine, indicating a possibility to be transported elsewhere. It creates a sense of uncertainty that mirrors the refugee journey—drifting on sea, endlessly waiting for a sign of rescue that might not ever manifest itself. The additional waves inside the nineteenth-century setting of Niagara Falls represent the hope of a better future, a symbol of possible resettlement in North America that the Vietnamese refugees from the 70s and 80s wished to reach.
If we consider the factual background of Church’s Study for "Under Niagara” as a practice copy for the lost painting Under Niagara which, then there is another dimension added to the wave arch depicted in Waves like a Wall—it heightens a construction of hope. Similar to the state of the painting Under Niagara, the depicted Vietnamese refugees in the second painting are lost and they are also looking for someone to find them, waiting for the rescue they have been longing for. The wave arch itself is their hope, a hope for a brand new life. So they look toward it, hoping to reach it and go through it. Despite the sign of hope, there is also a demonstration of the threats of thirst, hunger, and drowning that are constantly looming over the refugees in Waves like a Wall. This is shown through the small detail of a passenger falling off the boat, leaving only his legs pedaling out of the water without being noticed by others.
As Khoa Vu stated himself: “the depictions are not intended to be historically accurate nor are they fictitious. The end result is something in-between.”5 By consciously picking out pictorial elements to form his instructions for his collaborator, Khoa Vu recites the Vietnamese diaspora's history from both the clips of family anecdotes he recalled from his childhood and the art history training he received in the Western education.
A Transnational Collaboration for Memory Translation
One key aspect that separates Their Country from other artistic projects is Khoa Vu’s choice of collaboration with the Vietnamese reproduction painter in Go Vap, Vietnam. It is another strategy in which Khoa Vu implanted memory translation. Khoa Vu invited the Vietnamese painter on board as the primary producer besides himself to experiment with the subjectivity of memory. Neither Khoa Vu nor the painter have experienced the refugee journey, so by collectively imagining the refugee journey, they compress and transform it, bringing changes to the lasting trauma of the dangerous crossing.
Their collaboration is also built upon an existing round of memory compression that happened in the minds of his mother and aunt as their memories changed overtime. Before Khoa Vu sent in his instructions, the collected memories went through a second round of compression where he packed them into both a visual collage and a single paragraph. When the memories arrive on the painter’s side, he alone is the main player of a third round of the memory compression, first translating Khoa Vu’s recounting and then adding his nuances to reshape the memories into a form of landscape painting.
For Khoa Vu, the resulting paintings are not the art; instead, the process of transformation between his family’s stories and the paintings is the art.6 Within this “art of process,” the conversations he had with the Gallery owner whom the Vietnamese reproduction painter associated with also shaped their collaboration. During the twelve-week production period, they shared stories about the past and the present: a similar fleeing story of the gallerist’s cousin in the wake of the Vietnam War, the vaccine hesitancy in modern-day Vietnam, trust/distrust in governmental institutions, and the challenges of feeding pets during lockdown.7 The back-and-forth casual text updates between Khoa Vu, the gallerist, and the painter help to keep the history of their people alive across borders in the context of each individual’s own being. Hence, this collaboration is not restricted to the sole creation of the two oil paintings. It includes a generous sharing of the stories from both sides of homeland (Vietnam) and resettlement (Canada), which leads to an overall collaborative reimagination of old memories and imagining of new memories that hopefully envision their future.
Another major aspect of the collaborative process is the physical handling of the paintings through international shipping transportation. When Khoa Vu telephoned his digital-generated instructions from his Canadian number to the Vietnamese number overboard, the focus of the project was shifted to the journey the two paintings undertook after its birth. The journey began as the paintings were born under the hands of the Vietnamese painter in Vietnam. In the middle, it was paused due to the eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, after a few weeks of delay, the journey continued to a crossing over the ocean from its point of departure and finally arrived at the artist’s home in Canada after going through several transit centers. To some degree, the process of transportation replayed the escape route a Vietnamese refugee took back in the late twentieth century. However, this time with the newborn painting across borders, the old memory of the refugee journey is recast. According to anthropologist Louis-Jacques Dorais, “[the] process through which immigrants develop and maintain multiple social relations that link together their societies of origin and of resettlement” is a common definition of transnationalism.8 In the term of transnationalism, individuals whose constructed social fields transcend international borders are called “transmigrants.”9 Under the light of transnationalism, Khoa Vu and the paintings themselves could be considered “transmigrants,” crossing the international boundaries, both virtually and physically, connecting homeland and resettlement in the new era.
“Their Country”: A Wordplay of Nước (Water/Country)
I will now analyze the assigned title: “Their Country.” In the Vietnamese language, the word “country” is translated as “nước," which also means “water.” Therefore, “Their Country” also means “Their Water.” For Vietnamese people, water has the same symbolic importance as the country. It carries a derivative concept of founding peoplehood through collective nurture of the land (growing rice/agriculture) and represents a belonging to the community.10 Thus, the loss of the life source of water is equal to that of one’s nation, country, and homeland.11 In his analysis of water, the Vietnamese cultural and linguistic scholar Vinh Nguyen connects water’s symbolism of community and belonging to the context of the “boat-people crisis.” He states, “for the Vietnamese diaspora, water at once signals a cultural identity and separation from that identity, a home(land) as well as the violent rift from, and loss of that home.”12 By painting the “boat people” on waterscapes but choosing to name his project “Their Country” instead of “Their Water,” Khoa Vu hides the underlying meaning of water under the appearance of the two oil paintings and encourages viewers to make their own interpretations. In addition, the word “country” also highlights the displaced status of those who were forced to abandon their homeland and live adrift on a boat.
Furthermore, the water carries the “boat people’s” living memories and later becomes the memory itself, formulating a new spatiality that Vinh Nguyen coined as “oceanic spatiality.” Nguyen elaborates on Nguyen’s concept of “oceanic spatiality” in two dimensions; Firstly, it frames the sea as a refugee space that functions as the first place of refuge and, secondly, conceives of the boat as the locale of refugee experience preserves the assurance of life—hope.13 Together, the subject of the boat on water, in his words, “exists [a] potential for different rememberings, for impossible tellings, for becomings.”14
The title of Their Country can also be analyzed through the lens of “oceanic spatiality.” Khoa Vu’s Their Country conveys an expanded version of “country” with water-like fluent spatiality. For the “boat people,” their space of “country” becomes the water. It breaks free from the geographical boundaries and transforms the ordeal and anguish of the past into waves of hope that reunifies the lost souls of refugees, leading them towards a possible “becoming,” a subsequent future for their traversal journey.
Finally, in the interview, Khoa Vu mentioned that if “nước" is pronounced slightly different, it sounds very similar to the word “swallow.” Thus, the title “Their Country” could also be a metaphor for “swallowing” memories of the country, which plays with his project’s theme of translation.
A Call for Empowerment and Collaborative Storytelling
Art historian Didi-Huberman in his critique for Ai Wei Wei’s film Human Flow, suggests that refugees do not need philanthropy or charity but simply a set-in-stone status which sees them as equals.15 In relation to Didi-Huberman’s comment, Their Country is a bold, artistic statement that calls out to the public, saying that “we refugees are humans and what we have been through should not be treated as ‘crisis.’” Let us recall the timeline of the family album on display across the two oil paintings in the series of Their Country. Khoa Vu reconstructs his family album to retrace the translated memories back to its origins—his mother, aunt and relatives. The pictorial timeline focused on individual remembrance showcases the real people behind the stories as flesh and blood. It reassociates the anonymous “boat-people” in paintings with each distinct Vietnamese diasporic identity and creates an emotional oeuvre that speaks to the viewers, stating that these refugees are not just refugees; they are people, his family, a community.
At the end of the instructions Khoa Vu sent to the Vietnamese reproduction painter, he added a note: “make it for a museum.”16 Based on this note, I suggest that as a child of previous refugees, Khoa Vu hopes to advocate Their Country as an epic that celebrates the spirit of the Vietnamese “boat people." On canvas, the spirit is translated as a sign of hope embedded in the bright palette: the white foams that form at the swell's tips, the subtle beams of sun that burst through the purple clouds, or the light of the rainbow that reflects by the waterfalls. All these delightful colors generate a stream of empowering energy that flows into the veins of the viewers. The actual messaging of Their Country, like Khoa Vu explained, is “[their] identity.” The Vietnamese diaspora is not a buried, dark history; it has its value which brought the “boat-people” to this moment in time, and that is why “[it] is important and should be heard and voiced.”17 With Their Country, Khoa Vu offers an antidote for refugees’ conflicting identities. He generates a call for empowerment to encourage the Vietnamese-Canadian community to reconcile with their diasporic trauma by collecting, articulating, and translating their stories from the past to the present.
The call of empowerment is entangled with a call for collaborative storytelling. Considering artist Tania Bruguera’s quote, “we must not get tired but rather build common bonds of experience. The media have a unique role to play in fostering such engagements and building shared values by giving space to migrants and refugees to tell their own stories,”18 the refugee story told through Their Country is neither Khoa Vu’s single sharing nor a mutual sharing between Khoa Vu and the Vietnamese painter. It is rather a reflection on a broader collective experience that is shared among all displaced persons regardless of their ethnicity. Their Country is alternatively a creation of a shared media that fosters a collective process of storytelling. From one body to another, a displaced person can be inspired by Khoa Vu’s family stories, recognize their agency to tell another story and generate a cultural momentum. As the French philosopher, Édouard Glissant suggested,“[when] thought of self and thought of other become obsolete in their duality,”19 every single storyteller will be a part of one chain-effect, like a wave, spreading to every corner of the Western public sphere.
Conclusion
“I started the story with water, but the story doesn’t end with water,” Tam Khoa Vu sighed at the end of our interview. Indeed, the migration crisis starts with departure but does not end with arrival. The impact of the “boat-people crisis” creeps into the following decades and makes it hard for the next generations to adapt to its legacy. As a descendent of the Vietnamese “boat people”, Khoa Vu himself has struggled with the same identity crisis. His motivation to create Their Country was triggered by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time when anti-Asian violence was at its peak, he believed it was the time to bring the Asian stories to the forefront. There was a need for the Vietnamese-Canadian community and the broader Asian-Canadian community to be empowered by their origin stories. He felt it would be unfair to leave it for the next generation to resolve.
Consequently, Khoa Vu initiated Their Country as an experiment to keep his people’s history alive and also test out his idea of memory translation in a transnational collaborative context. Through his experimental collaboration with the Vietnamese reproduction painter, the old stories that had emerged from the homeland and the new stories born in the resettlement were reunited, creating an all-encompassing picture for his community. The project takes shape as a collaborative reimagination and rewriting of both the singular and collective Vietnamese memory.
Ultimately, Their Country ponders on the Vietnamese story rooted in water and imagines a concept of ‘the country’ as an infinite space of creation, unrestrained by the geographical limitation of borders. The title “Their Country” does not refer to others’ country, but “my” country and “your” country, as an intimate space. Nevertheless, we all live on the same planet and countries, like water, should allow for the nourishing of all beings to thrive.
Endnotes
Louis-Jacques Dorais, "From Refugees to Transmigrants: The Vietnamese in Canada," In Displacements and Diasporas: Asians in the Americas, ed. W. Anderson Wanni and G. Lee Robert (Rutgers University Press, 2005), 170
Vinh Nguyen, “Nu’óc/Water: Oceanic Spatiality and the Vietnamese Diaspora,” In Migration by Boat: Discourses of Trauma, Exclusion, and Survival, ed. Lynda Mannik (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016), 68.
Tam Khoa Vu, Handouts for Artch 2021 Exhibition, In the Author’s Possession, 2021.
NGA Online, “Wyeth Lecture in American Art 2007: Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939,” November 17, 2007, Video, 52:13, https://www.nga.gov/audio-video/video/wyeth-edward-hopper.html.
“Tam Khoa Vu,” Artch 4e édition, accessed December 10, 2021, https://artch.org/artists?artist=70.
Interview with Tam Khoa Vu by the author, November 10, 2021.
Tam Khoa Vu, handouts for Artch 2021 Exhibition, in the Author’s Possession, 2021.
Dorais, 171.
Dorais, 172.
Nguyen, 66.
Nguyen, 67.
Nguyen, 66.
Nguyen, 70-71.
Nguyen, 71.
Georges Didi-Huberman, "From A High Vantage Point," Esprit a, no.7-8 (2018), https://doi.org/10.3917/espri.1807.0065.
“All Projects: Their Country II,” TVU, accessed December 10, 2021, https://www.tamvu.biz/projects/their-country-ii.
Interview with Tam Khoa Vu by the author, November 10, 2021.
Hendrik Folkerts, “Twenty-Two Hours,” Mousse Magazine, summer 2018, 242.
Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 190.
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