Of Scrolls and Tears: Trinh Mai’s Archival Art and Organic Ephemera

Abstract

Of Scrolls and Tears: Trinh Mai’s Archival Art and Organic Ephemera H. J. Tam (bio) Titled Ba Ơi (Dear Father), Vietnamese American artist Trinh Mai’s 2017 mixed media portrait reproduces an enlarged photograph of the artist’s father-in-law, a former high-ranking official in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) named Phơưl Vân Thạch,1 holding a sign of his name at a reeducation camp after the Communist takeover of the country in 1975 (Figure 1). We see Phơưl with a deep frown, his mouth half open as if in mid-speech, defiant despite the abjection imposed by the state. In Trinh Mai’s depiction, this photograph from a haunting past becomes a memorial: carved onto the artwork’s surface are seventeen punctures representing the bullet wounds Phơưl sustained through the war, and the hand-painted Sanskrit words “dear father” cascade around the subject. The incisions reveal the thick texture of materials underneath: swatches from mourning bands worn in Vietnamese funerals and copies of Phơưl’s camp release papers. Less visible materials used in the artwork include rainwater from Vietnam, the tears Trinh Mai shed for her father-in-law, and the natural oils left on the canvas from her fingertips. In Dear Father, as in her other works introduced in this Portfolio feature, Trinh Mai combines the tangible and the imperceptible, discarded objects and living things, official documents and bodily secretions, to give form to the interstitial: between public and private, alive and demised. This critical interstitiality holds the diasporic Vietnamese consciousness that exists outside of dominant national histories in the United States and contemporary Vietnam; as such, the artworks grapple with “the sad and violent history that exists between Vietnam and the United States, and the politics of translocated race, gender, and class that springs from this past” (Espiritu 2010, 200). [End Page 43] Two prominent types of materials appear throughout Trinh Mai’s oeuvre: those that could be considered archival in nature (identification cards, letters, photographs) and organic elements (tears, eggshells, feathers). Combined in each work, their properties complement and transform each other: the organic materials lend their living aura to the historic documents, enabling these objects to conjure the specters of those who carried them through exile; at the same time, the archival materials fuse historicity into the ephemera, which symbolize refugees’ precarious, embodied experiences often unacknowledged in history books. In her use of photographic and written materials, Trinh Mai evinces what art critic Hal Foster (2004, 3) calls “an archival impulse.” Diverse in their subjects and media, Foster writes, archival artists share “a will to relate— to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs . . . to ascertain what might remain for the present” (21). For Trinh Mai, the “misplaced past” is the ill-understood story of Vietnamese refugees like her family after the fall of Saigon. Moreover, Trinh Mai’s mixing of organic substances recalls the influence of bioart, which, as Robert Mitchell (2010, 26) explains, couples artistic goals with biological technologies to make statements about the problematic of biotechnology. While Trinh Mai shares with bioartists the desire to solicit a moral response to the living beings and biological processes manipulated into art, her focus and intent in integrating organic materials in her work are different: instead of commenting theoretically on the state of biotechnology and its industries, Trinh Mai situates her work historically and politically in the legacy of the Vietnam War and mourns through her art those deemed disposable by regimes of power, in Vietnam and the United States. Without Trinh Mai’s artistic treatment, Phơưl, the reeducation camp inmate in Mai’s Dear Father, would otherwise have no public recognition: he is disavowed in Vietnam, where the government continues to suppress critiques of its postwar treatment of South Vietnamese, and in the United States, where the American soldier/veteran retains discursive primacy. Neither is Phơưl a “boat person” figure, with its representational burden of helplessness and proof of the West’s humanitarian gift of freedom, as Mimi Nguyen (2012) has suggested. The artist’s father-in-law appears here only through reproduced state documents, that is...