A & E

Mention Vietnam to most Americans, and it likely will conjure more than just an image of a Southeast Asian country. Most think of the country only in terms of the American conflict that ended more than 30 years ago, especially veterans of that war and the refugees who came to this country as a result of it.

Howard Henry Chen, 34, is one such refugee. He was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1972 and left for the United States with his family in 1975. Growing up in Harrisburg, he knew little about the American Vietnam War (1960-75). He only knew what he had heard from his parents and veterans and what he had learned from a visit to the Vietnam War Memorial. In fact, he couldn't even speak Vietnamese.

But that all changed in 1999, when he won the first Fulbright fellowship given in photography to Vietnam. Having a background in journalism, Chen first studied photography at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where he sharpened his interest in cultural hybridity and produced a project on second-generation Vietnamese in the American South.

Since then, he has been shuttling back and forth doing photographic work, looking up distant relatives and learning the language. And his efforts have paid off, most recently in the form of a $5,000 fellowship award associated with Silver Eye Center for Photography's annual juried exhibition, "Fellowship 2006."

That's why visitors to Silver Eye Center for Photography on the South Side will find 11 large-scale contemporary photographs of Vietnam, images ranging from its somber war memorials to its gaudy amusement parks. The photographs by Chen make up his solo exhibition "Multiple Entry Visa: To Vietnam and Back."

Chen lives in Chicago, where he recently received an Master of Fine Arts in photography from Columbia College Chicago.

The photographs on view were selected through a process in which the submitters remained anonymous. The judge selected by Silver Eye this year was Rod Slemmons, director of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, also at Columbia College Chicago. He chose Chen's work from a total of 284 Silver Eye members from 36 states and two foreign countries who all vied for the prize.

"I chose Howard Henry Chen for the Fellowship 2006 Award because of what seems to me to be their topicality -- their reference to and elucidation of the current American embroilment in Iraq," Slemmons says. "What will that country look like 40 years from now?"

In this exhibition, Chen shows a Vietnam today that is markedly different, despite lingering signs of past American involvement. People finally have begun to look at the country from another perspective, now that travelers and tourists from the West are being welcomed into what was once a forbidden country.

Through these large-scale works, some of which take the form of diptychs and triptychs, Chen shows us that not just tourists, but the natives themselves, view Vietnam in a whole new light.

That's why visitors will find images such as "My Vietnamese cousin on his first trip to see the grounded Huey in Ho Chi Minh City." The photo shows Chen's cousin Kha smoking a cigarette, rather aloof in light of the restored Huey helicopter that sits outside one of the many museums that relate to the Vietnamese war. The aircraft is just one of several such war memorials located throughout the country.

As Chen recalls in an accompanying dialogue: "Me: 'What?! Twenty-six years and you've never been here?' to which he replies: 'What's this stuff got to do with me?' He had a point."

"His idea of Vietnamese history is a little bit different from mine," Chen says of his cousin, during a telephone call from Chicago. "He grew up with socialized propaganda from the Communist party, and I learned it from talking to vets and visiting the Vietnam War Memorial. So his idea of Vietnam and my idea of Vietnam were really different. But it surprised me that in all of his years living there, he had never been to this monument before. And it took my being in Vietnam to bring him to this place. Otherwise, I don't think that he would have visited it for years."

Chen says Kha is part of Vietnam's "Generation @."

"It's an obvious allusion to Generation X and/or Y," Chen says. "The term was first used by a young Vietnamese novelist a few years ago. The @ refers to the @ in email addresses, but it also refers to hip, young, connected and rich Vietnamese who cruise around on very expensive, imported Honda motorcycles called the Honda @."

While Kha was interested in showing his American cousin all of the new amusement parks that catered to young affluent families, Chen was more interested in photographing European tourists visiting war memorials. But he gave in just the same.

That's why, also on view, visitors will find candy-colored photographs of fanciful follies found in those amusement parks, such as the elaborately decorated buildings in "Dragon and Phoenix No. 2, Suoi Tien Amusement Park, near Ho Chi Minh City."

Here, an amusement park visitor reads the sign in front of an exaggerated totem in the form of a Phoenix, which is situated in front of a building in the shape of a dragon.

"The dragon is the symbol of Vietnam, and the Phoenix is drawn from the mythologies of China," Chen says.

"When I would ask my cousins to take me to places so that I could take pictures, they would take me to places like this," Chen says, "because they weren't interested in places like China Beach and Khe Sanh. I had to bring them to those places. These really over-the-top, really kitschy amusement parks were the places that they brought me to."

Chen says that when he first went to Vietnam, he didn't know a soul. He literally knocked on the doors of his grandfather's relatives.

"When I first went there, I was really interested in how they felt about the war," Chen says. "As a Vietnamese American, I was always placed in this context of being a refugee from the Vietnam War. And when I went there, for some naive reason, I brought that context with me. But if you talk with anyone who spends a lot of time in Vietnam, (they'll tell you) it's a place where the (American Vietnamese) war is just seen as one of many wars.

"It's not even considered the Vietnam War; technically it's the Second Indochina war. There was a war with China afterwards. There was a war with France before. There was a thousand years of Chinese colonialism before that. So, I learned over these last six years to look at it a little less myopically. Instead, to look at Vietnam as a place of compressed history."

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