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Pleasanton’s Museum on Main is opening a new exhibit that features 25 pieces of work from Vietnamese artists and writers who attempt to capture the impact the end of the Vietnam War had on the culture and diaspora.
The exhibit, titled “Textures of Remembrance: Vietnamese Artists and Writers Reflect on the Vietnamese Diaspora”, aims to show how refugees from the war were not just people who needed to be saved — they were subjects of artistic and political transformation, according to a May 25 press release from the museum.
“Understandably, much of our framework in the U.S. for the Vietnam War has come through the experiences of Americans who served in it,” Sarah Schaefer, executive director of the museum, said in the press release. “This exhibit gives us a unique opportunity to learn from the perspectives of those Vietnamese who had to flee their country at the end of the war and became refugees.”
April 30, 1975 is a date that many of south Vietnamese descent remember poignantly — it’s a date that marked new beginnings as North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, capital of South Vietnam, and ended the Vietnam War.
According to the press release, the exhibit at Pleasanton’s museum will reflect on that day from different perspectives in the past and present through written word, visual creations and audiovisual pieces. The goal of the exhibit is to reveal an intimate look at the “diasporic experience that has been gathered, created, collected and re-collected, and imagined and reimagined since 1975.”
Those pieces are meant to showcase personal struggles and memories from those who lived through that time in Vietnam and who were refugees to demonstrate the continued effects the war has to this day when it comes to issues such as identity, sense of family and community and representation.
“The project aims to present a humanities-driven exploration of the impact of the Vietnam War, collect and share stories in the diasporic Vietnamese community to foster healing and connection, build intergenerational and cross-cultural understanding, and counter stereotypes of and racism towards Vietnamese Americans and refugees,” according to the museum’s press release.
The exhibit also features work made within the Vietnamese diasporic community that looks to humanize the refugee experience from the inside out.
“We also hope that these reflections on the experience of flight, of seeking refuge from catastrophe, will resonate with a lot of people whose families came to America from elsewhere, or that they will spark empathy in people who don’t recognize a personal connection to the refugee experience,” museum curator Ken MacLennan said in the statement.
The pieces that are being showcased in this traveling exhibit were curated by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, a nonprofit organization that fosters diasporic Vietnamese and Southeast Asian literary and artistic voices, according to the nonprofit’s website. The exhibit was also created thanks to Exhibit Envoy — a nonprofit that helps provide museums with meaningful and diverse exhibits — and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.
The exhibit will be open to the public beginning on June 11 and will be featured at the museum until Sept. 28. More information is available at museumonmain.org.
