8 Artists Reflect on the American War in Vietnam, 50 Years On

On May 22, 1970, the Art Strike Against racism, sexism, repression, and war uprooted the New York art world for one day. The strike was organized in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s announcement to expand the US’s war from Vietnam into Cambodia; of mass shootings at Kent State and Jackson State; and of the killing of six Black men and injuring of 75 others by police in Augusta, Georgia. Over 50 galleries, as well as the Whitney Museum and the Jewish Museum, closed. The Museum of Modern Art stayed open with the exception of its Frank Stella exhibition—the artist ordered that it be shuttered—but dropped all admission charges and organized a photo show dedicated to student protests. The Guggenheim was also open and free, but stripped its paintings off the walls. The Met did nothing, so nearly 500 protesters took over the steps for a sit-in.
 
The strike was a pointed if imperfect act of solidarity, one that feels hard to imagine happening today, even as war, mass shootings, and police brutality have hardly abated. Is that because those horrors have become so normalized in American life, because the art world is so professionalized now, because few can afford to lose even a day of work amid a cost-of-living crisis, or because the fractured Left has struggled to organize as effectively? Probably, a little bit of each.
 
US troops officially withdrew from Vietnam in April 1975. Fifty years on, and there is still so much to process from that American War in Vietnam. Look closely, and you’ll see that many artists are doing just that, often approaching it indirectly. Moving beyond straight war imagery and the ethical dilemmas associated with it, plenty of artists are exploring not only policies and massacres but the long tail of the war’s aftershocks, which have reverberated for generations.
 
Galvanized by recent programming in New York reflecting on the war’s 50th anniversary—a series at Performance Space New York, organized by Lumi Tan, Anh Vo, and maura nguyễn donohue, as well as accompanying panels and publications—we asked eight artists to talk about how their work has processed the war’s history. This group represents artists from different generations and from different parts of Southeast Asia that were affected by the two-decade-long American War. Throughout these conversations, art emerged as a container for that war’s complexities and contradictions. Below, the artists—Tiffany Chung, Pao Houa Her, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Alison Nguyen, Anh Vo, Tammy Nguyen, Thu Van Tran, and Vũ Đức Toàn—discuss in their own words how new formal strategies for representing war and its ramifications might enable us to learn from history through richer kinds of conversations, and to form solidarities.