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Arts

An unsettled home

Hoang Van-Bui's latest series of work leaves behind his immigration to examine his cautious American domestication.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published March 27, 2005

[Images from Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art]

Hoang Van-Bui, Homefronts 3: Home Alone, 2005, computer board, fired clay, tar, touch sensor, school bus paint, school bus part, tail lights.

	Hoang Van-Bui, Homefronts 6: Home Broken, 2005, broken rocking chair, wax, tar.
	Works in progress Students from East Lake, Palm Harbor University and Tarpon Springs High Schools work on “Who We Are,” the collaboration between Van-Bui and the students whose art is on display in an adjacent gallery. The students’ statements accompany the art and they range from poignant and hopeful to cynical and angry.

TARPON SPRINGS - "What is it to be at home?" the playwright Samuel Beckett once asked. An Irishman who expatriated to Paris and wrote his major works in French, he well understood displacement and used his absurdist plays to explore it.

Beckett chose to live in a foreign land, so it is in a completely different way that Hoang Van-Bui has asked that same question in the much-admired art he has created during the past 15 or so years.

"Homefronts" is a body of mostly new work by Van-Bui at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art that refines two symbols he has used repeatedly in his more recent conceptual works, the round, fecund shape juxtaposed with a sharp angle. It's paired with another exhibition, "Who We Are," works by high school students working in collaboration with Van-Bui.

The Vietnamese-American artist came to the United States when he was 8 with his father, who had been a soldier in the South Vietnamese army and fled with his son in a small boat as the country fell. They were separated from Van-Bui's mother and five siblings, who followed them later, but the circumstances of that flight were so grim, he does not like to discuss them.

He did not speak English and said he felt such hostility from Americans on his arrival here that, growing up in Tampa, he refused to learn the language until he was a teenager. He communicated with his teachers by drawing pictures, illustrating what he was thinking. He has never stopped.

He worked his way through college and graduate school choosing sculpture, in the broadest sense, as his medium. He has used his large-scale installations and wall assemblages of found objects to reconcile the dichotomies of East and West, foreignness and familiarity.

Some past work in other exhibitions, such as a room filled with shredded tires pocked with bamboo stumps or stacks of fragile gold and silver prayer papers unfurling along a path of tar, were almost painful to behold. They are stories of the profound sense of loss such violent displacement had on a sensitive little boy who grew up a stranger in a strange land. What has always saved his work from bathos or cliche is his elegant restraint and nuance.

The six assemblages in the "Homefront" series deal with domestication rather than diaspora and, while still somber, are not as elegiac. They hold a glimmer of reconciliation. In them, the swollen human belly, nexus of pleasure and pain in many Eastern religions, is now a Westernized heart that often pierces the angled cutout, the motif he has used in the past to signal a journey. Here, it seems to be an arrow on the same trajectory as the heart.

In Homefronts 4: Home Study, rubber nipples from baby bottles are lined up as a grid on a bright yellow metal strip from a school bus, paired with a slab of slate centered with a heart of fired clay, inscribed with a doily pattern and burnished to look like carved wood. The "chalk" board is covered with signatures like autographs in a school yearbook. They were written by a group of students he worked with, real people who have been important to them. They are not the names of blood family, but an extended one, part of the it-takes-a-village idea of nurturing even though, like the rubber nipples, they are sometimes substitutes for the real thing.

The nipples are inverted like navels in Homefronts 2: Welcome Home, into a bed of bleached denim scraps washed with yellow paint. As with the slate, they bear names, written in encaustic wax. This heart is ambiguously covered in mesh, both protected and trapped.

The sense of "home" as a safe haven is constantly challenged in such ways.

Part of an old door is used in Homefronts 1: Model Home, but its center panel, usually a pane of glass allowing us to look in or out, is boarded up. The heart is made of bathroom tiles again signed with names and it seems to zoom into the familiar angle incised in part of the door, demanding to be let in the back way if the front remains closed.

The school bus, another iconic symbol of childhood journeys, recurs. Van-Bui takes old bus parts such as its tail lights that are activated when you touch the fat yellow heart mounted on tar-coated computer boards and studded with orbs in Homefronts 3: Home Alone. School-bus yellow paint is slathered with tar into which pieces of a bentwood rocking chair are embedded in Homefronts 6: Home Broken. And its heart, made of wax, is split in half and placed at opposite ends of the surface. The obvious interpretation is that of broken hearts, but this is so much more. The two parts resemble a breast and buttocks and carry associations with pleasure and pain, with intimate functions and activities.

"Homefronts" is probably Van-Bui's most personal work and he is obviously exploring ways to merge his cerebral formalism with an emotional component.

Once a Pond a Time is a large installation in the center of the gallery. Platforms are covered in scraps of blue jeans and arranged as a rectangle with a cutout. A bed of rice (700 pounds of it, I'm told) flows into the angle, white sand meeting blue sea. Except that a video of swarming koi is projected onto the rice. It's a combination of basic food, basic clothing, artifice versus nature, reality and illusion.

The massive gray concrete wall in the museum's foyer acts as the canvas for Inches Between Us, a monumental installation of several hundred random found objects, all yellow. Van-Bui said he has collected these things - a piece of hose, rope, a tie, a rubber duck, a coffee can cover, a measuring spoon; if it's yellow it's there - for four years. Van-Bui arranged them into a 35- by 20-foot triangle, its top point angled around the wall onto the glass entrance, that at first suggests a vortex into which matter is sucked. But take the time to contemplate them (without getting a strained neck), which is what Van-Bui's work begs for, and they begin to float like a blurry constellation of stars that seem packed together from earth's vantage when in reality they're millions of miles apart. In using discarded relics, the artist extends the metaphor as one of detachment and, again, dislocation.

The only work not created for the exhibition is Code White (Accident) from 2000, another monumental assemblage. It's the most polemical piece here, an American flag measuring about 30 by 15 feet, draped on a wall and folded into a triangle at one end in the way military flags are presented at funerals, pointing toward a tarred panel partially covered with a mass of gunstocks. Like his other work, this one's imagery is more complex than it seems. As a child, Van-Bui helped his father clean his military guns after school every day. It was a job about helping one person stay alive while others potentially would die. America, the country that allowed his family to survive, was also responsible for a different kind of death.

The poet William Butler Yeats, another Irishman who understood dislocation and loss, was asked once why he continued to write about a sadder past when he, in old age, found personal happiness. He replied that great art rarely comes from happiness. There's something of the tragic-artist pose in the remark but also a measure of truth. Van-Bui would be a different artist, maybe no artist at all, had his life not been torn apart so dramatically. His experiences have given him his themes and his talent makes them rich and resonant.

In a smaller gallery at Leepa-Rattner is a collaboration between Van-Bui and students from East Lake, Palm Harbor University and Tarpon Springs High Schools. For several months, he met with them after school to discuss and facilitate art based on identity and cultural diversity. They are a wonderful collective of individual interpretations. The students' statements accompany the art and they range from poignant and hopeful to cynical and angry. I was impressed with the depth of feeling either way.

REVIEW: "Hoang Van-Bui: Homefronts" is at the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, 600 Klosterman Road, on the Tarpon Springs campus of St. Petersburg College, through April 24. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday with extended hours to 9 p.m. Thursday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 adults, $4 seniors, free to students and children. No admission on Sunday. (727) 712-5762.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 24, 2005, 09:03:04]