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Yahoo
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
50 Years After the Fall of Saigon, Three Vietnamese American Artists Reflect on Loss and Resilience
Exactly fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War—a nearly two-decade-long conflict—came to a definitive end with the fall of Saigon. As North Vietnamese forces took control of the South's capital, the country was officially reunified under communist rule. In the aftermath, more than two million Vietnamese fled their homeland in search of safety and freedom, with nearly 760,000 resettling in the United States between 1975 and 2002. The U.S. involvement in the war, which began with aid to South Vietnam but escalated into a full-scale military intervention, was met with intense criticism both domestically and abroad. Widely viewed as a harrowing example of American imperialism and military overreach, the conflict remains one of the most controversial and painful chapters in U.S. history. Today, the echoes of that war still resonate across generations. In Vietnam, its scars are etched into the landscape and collective memory. In America, Vietnamese communities continue to grapple with questions of identity, exile, and belonging. For many, these questions are not just historical—they are deeply personal. Art, in its power to carry and transform emotion, has offered a way through. For numerous Vietnamese American artists, creative expression has become a vehicle to confront, reframe, and make sense of inherited trauma and personal displacement. Below, three leading Vietnamese American creatives—photographer An-My Lê, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, and filmmaker and sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyen—share how their art has been shaped by the legacy of war. Through their distinct practices, they explore memory, loss, resistance, and what it means to create from the margins of a story that once defined them. An-My Lê was born in Saigon in 1960 and fled Vietnam for the United States in 1975, eventually resettling in Sacramento, California. Known for her evocative large-format images that explore the legacies of war and the complexities of military power, her work often blends documentary and staged elements to question the boundaries between history and memory. Lê's critically acclaimed series, such as Small Wars and 29 Palms, have been exhibited internationally and her work has been collected by museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. About a year and a half ago, in November 2023, a bunch of us Vietnamese American and American Vietnamese artists in New York decided to get together—and we've been getting together every two months or so since. We get together around food or around someone's book launch or for a holiday or something like that. When it was my turn [to host], in early February of this year, I prepared something for Tết [which celebrates the arrival of spring] at my house. It was very festive. At one point when we all sat down, one of the younger artists asked, 'What are your favorite memories of Tết?' I said Tết 1968, which of course was the day of the surprise attack on Saigon during the Vietnam War; it was very traumatic. Another artist close in age to me who grew up in Da Nang, said, 'I remember that that night. The ammunition storage that was in Da Nang got hit and it blew up like fireworks.' So he was talking about something that was devastating but also beautiful to watch. Then the younger artists followed up with happy memories; I think that speaks to the fact that the way we approach things depends on our experience. At the beginning of my photography practice, I didn't even want to think about the idea of war because it was so traumatic. But while I was in grad school for photography at Yale, President Clinton lifted the economic embargo on and renewed relations with Vietnam, which meant that Vietnamese Americans were able to return home safely. When I graduated, I got a small grant, and I went to Vietnam and became a landscape photographer there. In my head I was going to do something else. The pictures I made were about contemporary Vietnam, but they were also about the things that I felt I had missed growing up in a country during a war, about the things I could barely remember that I experienced a little bit in my childhood. They're about stories I heard and family lore. My mother is from the North where the landscape is radically different from the South, and I never knew that because the country was separated in 1954. Those first pictures I took of Vietnam helped make things I'd heard about or remembered but didn't have access to tangible. I was very engaged with anything that had to do with daily life, manual labor and agricultural traditions. Those are things that tie us to the land and echo more peaceful times. After photographing there for a few years, it was obvious that I needed to address the issue of war. I was not interested in recreating what we already know about the Vietnam War in my images. I was more interested in Americans' idea of the war, how they had been thinking about it. I also wanted to explore my relationship to the war. Some of [what I know] is real and some of it is filtered through films and literature. When I started working with the American military, I think some people misunderstood. 'But they destroyed your country. Why do you want to have to do anything with them?' It's much more complicated than that. I wanted to understand an institution that I have very mixed emotions about, so I think it allowed me to parse out my ambiguous feelings. I can be empathetic towards members of the armed forces, especially the women, while being appalled by some of the geopolitical decisions that were made. With my photographic and video series 29 Palms, which I captured at the 29 Palms Marines training facility in California, I was distraught about the effect of another war on a young group of American men and women who were training for deployment to Iraq. The series doesn't just question how they'll be affected by war and what will happen to them, which is devastating, but it also examines the effect of war on their communities. It's as much about the Marines as it is about the way it affects the extended families and the rest of the country. Photography has the ability to engage with a complex subject in complex ways, and you don't necessarily have to simplify the equation. Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in South Vietnam in 1971. His family fled Vietnam for the United States in 1975, eventually settling in California. He is the author of the novel The Sympathizer, which became a MAX Original Series, as well as the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial, among other books. I grew up in the United States as an American, but also very aware of myself as a Vietnamese person who had come from a war. My refugee experience has been fundamental to who I am as a writer and as a human being. What's been really crucial to shaping my artistic practice has been to recognize that wars always produce refugees and wars are central to the United States. Arguably, perpetual war characterizes American history. My work has been very much about using war and refugees to pry apart so much of American mythology. I write about the Vietnam War and its consequences from the perspectives of diverse Vietnamese peoples and not from American points of view. And that's been a challenge because if Americans encounter narratives that do not put Americans at the center, they have a hard time comprehending what is happening. at I'm sick and tired of this anniversary. We have learned all the wrong lessons from the Vietnam War. We will pretend that we learned to 'always remember the past' and 'remember the casualties.' But the lesson we should have learned is that we should never interfere with another country's struggles for independence and liberation, as Americans. And of course in the years after the Vietnam War, what we saw is that we did precisely that from Iraq to Afghanistan to Israel and Palestine. This effort to rewrite a bad war as a good war has taken place at the highest levels of government, and it's been bipartisan. It doesn't matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican leader of this country. American presidents have always said it was a noble but flawed war, and that the lesson we should learn for our next war is how to fight that war better. That has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. I've visited a lot of historical museums in Vietnam. I've read the comments in the guest books. Half of the American tourist population says, 'oh my God, we were guilty of war crimes.' The other half says,' hey, this is communist propaganda.' It's not to say that the memory of the victorious Vietnamese and Vietnam is not important. In Vietnam, it's important for the victorious Vietnamese to assert their history, but in so doing, they also arguably distort the history. Because if you were a defeated Vietnamese, and you go and you look at the historical accounts, what you also see is erasure and distortion from your perspective. And that's to serve the current power structure of the Vietnamese government. That is not unusual. It happens in every country, but what happens in Vietnam, mostly stays in Vietnam. What happens in the United States ripples all over the world. I will be spending the 50th anniversary writing about all the consequences of the Vietnam War, in places like El Salvador. I was in El Salvador in February, investigating massacres that were committed by US trained soldiers at the same time that Marco Rubio was in town signing the deportation agreement with President Bukele, now very much front page news. That is a direct consequence of the Vietnam War because in 1983, Ronald Reagan said 'the lines of the Cold War have shifted to El Salvador.' And we're dealing with the long term consequences of that. The Vietnam War has embedded itself in American culture and is shaping our contemporary politics today. Born in Saigon and raised in California after his family fled Vietnam in 1979, Tuan Andrew Nguyen is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores themes of memory, trauma, and the legacies of colonialism and war. Nguyen often uses storytelling and speculative history to give voice to marginalized narratives, and his films and sculptural installations have been exhibited globally, including at the Venice Biennale. On October 31, Nugyen will unveil a new 20-foot-high kinetic mobile at the brand new Princeton University Art Museum. I grew up fascinated with storytelling, which is the way I came to understand my place in the world. After we left Vietnam we landed in Oklahoma, where there weren't very many Vietnamese people. I would take the stories I heard from my grandparents or from aunties and uncles and friends and try to piece together an answer for myself. I moved back to Vietnam in my late 20s to be with my maternal grandmother, who stayed in Vietnam but managed to get most of her children out. She was a writer and a poet, and I grew up hearing about how she used writing as a way to reflect upon her situation. On a more philosophical level, I wanted to broaden my understanding of Vietnam. I've spent half of my life between Vietnam and the US. My fascination with storytelling is what initially brought me to practicing art. My work has always been very grounded in trying to figure out what the war and its legacy means. I work a lot in moving image and sculpture, with this idea of storytelling as a form of empowerment or political resistance or solidarity. I think about the moving image as a place to explore the different entanglements of my own personal history and the overall history of the world. My sculptures are an extension of how I tell stories. They're very much based in looking at materials that have a certain historical weight and trying to find ways to transform them. My work spans different regions and different histories, but all of it is rooted by my preoccupation with the outcomes and the traumas left behind by colonialism, war and displacement. I've worked with indigenous people in Australia who were forced off their native land. I've collaborated with the Senegalese Vietnamese community in Dakar who come out of a migration of Vietnamese women and children after the French were defeated in Vietnam in 1954. I've also been working with communities in the central region of Vietnam, particularly in Quảng Trị, that is still–50 years after the end of the war–dealing with the catastrophic effects of UXO, or unexploded ordnance. The number of civilians in Vietnam who have died from or been seriously injured or maimed because of UXO explosions during peacetime far exceeds the active American military casualties during wartime. These are numbers that we are constantly faced with as we look at the legacy of the American war in Vietnam. They're physical reminders of what happened. So, even though my practice spans a broad geography, it all comes from a very personal journey of trying to figure out what it means to be resilient in the face of destruction. And I've met amazing people with amazing stories on this journey. Has anything become crystallized through my work? No, I find myself with more and more questions. But I think that's the journey that this career has to give. I think art must provide more questions and not necessarily provide answers. It's important to understand the world in a very dimensional way, because, if not, we're going to be easily Might Also Like 4 Investment-Worthy Skincare Finds From Sephora The 17 Best Retinol Creams Worth Adding to Your Skin Care Routine
Euronews
12-02-2025
- Business
- Euronews
Heineken shares climb as brewer announces strong profits and buyback
Heineken shares rose by more than 12% on Wednesday as the firm announced an organic 5% rise in net revenue for 2024, which came in at €29.96bn. Operating profit, meanwhile, came in at €4.51bn, an 8.3% annual jump. Beer volume grew by 1.6% in the year, beating analysts' expectations of a 1.39% gain, and free operating cash flow exceeded €3bn. "We delivered solid results with broad-based growth and profit expansion in 2024", CEO Dolf van den Brink said in an earnings statement. "Premium volume grew 5%, led globally by Heineken, which was up 9%. Mainstream beer volume rose 2%, spearheaded by the leading brands in our largest markets, including Amstel in Brazil, Cruzcampo in the UK, and Kingfisher in India." Van den Brink also noted a strong performance by Desperados and Savanna cider in Southern Africa, as well as underlining a 10% rise in global sales of Heineken's non-alcoholic beer. In light of the strong results, the Dutch brewer announced a two-year €1.5bn share buyback programme. The move comes after a rocky period for Heineken, notably as consumers cut back on spending linked to cost-of-living pressures. Compared with February 2020, the brewer's share price is still down around 25%. Challenges in store "We anticipate ongoing macro-economic challenges that may affect our consumers, including weak consumer sentiment in Europe, volatility, inflationary pressures and currency devaluations across developing markets, and broader geopolitical fluctuations", said Heineken in its earnings statement. Looking ahead to results for 2025, the brewer predicted that operating profit (beia) would grow organically in the range of 4% to 8%. Technical factors, such as the timing of Easter and the Vietnamese celebration Tết, could affect the first quarter. Van den Brink told journalists on a call that he is monitoring potential tariffs from the US administration but did not envisage there would be a major impact.
