The Light Work Annual, CS 142
Essay by Kevin B. Chen:
When we die, our bodies may be buried, cremated, or embalmed, yet the age-old question of what happens to our soul after death remains. Across cultures throughout the centuries, death has consistently inhabited a space that invokes both mystery and profundity. Through explanations of salvation or reincarnation, varying responses to what happens to the immaterial spirit continue to invoke either dogmatic or open-ended answers amongst us all. Although our physical form may wither away to carbon and dust, we still don't really know what happens to the essence of ourselves-the accumulated memories, the aggregated experiences, the stored up activities and behaviors that helped to define each of us as individual beings.
Binh Danh has gained prominent recognition for his unique method of developing images in plant material by harnessing the power of sunlight to exploit the natural process of photosynthesis to produce his pieces, letting the sun do its work in the same manner a darkroom enlarger would. It sometimes takes weeks or months for images to emerge, depending on the specific properties of the leaf or grass that he uses as canvas for a particular piece. Once the desired contrast is achieved, he immerses the plant material into clear acrylic resin, freezing the image in time as specimens to be viewed and contemplated.
Danh is part of a generation of Vietnamese who came to this country in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. He came to the US as a child with his family in the 1970s, and returned to visit Vietnam only several years ago as a young adult. Like many born during and after that era, the Vietnam War is a distant memory, highly mediated through history textbooks and mass media. Yet, by directly seeing and walking on the landscape of his birth country, Danh could intimately comprehend history on another level-the brutal legacy of war and the thousands of individuals, both Vietnamese and American, who perished on that land. What happened to the physical bodies is harrowingly undeniable-mass graves, rows of body bags, corpses strewn on country roads. Yet the question of where the spirits of these people went remains in the world of the enigmatic and unknown. It is through his work that Danh approaches these inexplicable questions. He positions a visual world that wonders if the land could serve as witness to the passing of life, to the transit of souls-if the landscape could literally absorb the essence of those who died upon it, compelling those of us still here to remember and bear witness to the unseen passing of lives. The imprint of war becomes physically manifest.
Danh's significant body of work dealing with those who perished on both sides of the war does more than simply memorialize and pay respect to the dead-it raises a number of questions about the nature of life and the possibility of afterlife. In his new series, he combines his own childhood memories of the Swamp Thing (1) within larger themes of death and resurrection. The Swamp Thing centers around the story of scientist Dr. Alec Holland, who was working in the Louisiana swamps on a bio-restorative formula designed to promote crop growth and end world hunger. After an explosion covered his body with burning chemicals, Holland escaped from the laboratory and fell into the waters of the swamp. His chemical-covered body decomposed and was ingested by the plant life in the swamp, which subsequently developed sentience and began not only to resemble Dr. Holland's body as a hideous, humanoid plant creature, but also to possess his memory and personality. He was no longer a human who had been turned into a plant, but rather a plant that had tried to become Dr. Holland.
The juxtaposition of these two series, one based in the larger context of American popular culture and one based in the larger context of American history, creates an open-ended narrative that looks at the questions of life and death, of corporeality and immateriality, and the fundamental notions of where the essence of ourselves resides.
Kevin B. Chen (c)2007
1. First introduced as a comic book character in the early 1970s by DC Comics, the Swamp Thing became the focus of a long-running horror-fantasy comic book series of the same name, as well as two full-length films, a live-action television series, and a short-lived animated cartoon series. A moderate collection of merchandise was also produced for the cartoon and television series, including action figures, stickers, and a board game, which Danh began to collect along with movie posters and issues of the comic book series.
Binh Danh lives in San Jose, CA. He participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program in October 2006. His work can be viewed at http://www.binhdanh.com/
Kevin B. Chen is an artist and curator living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is the program director for visual arts at Intersection for the Arts, one of the oldest alternative non-profit art spaces in the country
Regardless of generation, cultural background, or level of direct involvement with war, we cannot escape being touched by the faces in Binh Danh’s series, titled 'One Week’s Dead'. Danh collects photographs and other remnants of the Vietnam War and reprocesses them in a way that brings new light to a history marked by painful memories. A main source of the images is the 1969 Life magazine article, 'Faces of the American Dead: One Week’s Dead'. (1) Portraits of two hundred forty-two young American men, casualties in one week of the war, were presented in a yearbook-style layout, triggering a powerful public response: "the entire nation mourned those soldiers...you saw those faces, that’s what brought it home to everyone." (2)
Danh returns these faces to the public’s attention nearly four decades later. Using photosynthesis, he incorporates the portraits into the cells of leaves and grasses, symbolic of the jungle itself bearing witness to scars of war that remain in the landscape. Danh’s method is based on a principle as simple as leaving a water hose on the lawn too long. The cells in leaves react to light by turning dark green, or the absence of light by turning pale. Danh is able to create images onto leaves, not by printing onto them, but by capturing the image within the leaves. By imprinting faces of war casualties and anonymous soldiers from the battlefield, Danh encapsulates remnants of history in the biological memory of plant cells. Through this process, he recycles collected news images and snapshots from an isolated past and memorializes them in the present. The final product, leaves embedded in resin, transform the source images into precious, yet permanent artifacts.
Using his unique work process, Danh is reconstructing histories that occurred before he was born, but have undoubtedly affected him. He investigates memories of the Vietnam War by resurrecting pictures of its human toll. In doing so, he fulfills a personal need to better understand a time he is too young to recall first-hand. Danh describes that the past has always made its presence felt, even a world away from Vietnam. He was less than two years of age when his family escaped Vietnam to establish a new home in the United States. Danh has been able to gather stories from his mother and to visit Vietnam with her as a young adult, giving him access to a rich history that exceeds the knowledge of many in his generation. He relates that most second-generation Vietnamese-Americans are curious about their families' pasts, but perhaps just as many elders prefer to keep silent about vivid memories of unspeakable violence, pain, and sometimes shameful regret. His plight reminds us that we are all, despite our degree of knowledge, profoundly affected by events that occur before our time.
For Danh, his first trip to Vietnam was part of his quest to construct his own impression of the country and reclaim its history. The trip was profoundly influential in the development of his photographic process that literally and figuratively places Vietnam War images in nature. He recalls the presence of war still visible in the landscape years later-bomb craters repurposed to rice paddies; children born with missing limbs, still paying the price for the use of Agent Orange during the war. It became clear to Danh that the jungle landscape was both a target and backdrop to the war. Long after nature had camouflaged physical scars with new growth, the war was still living there, in the land and its people.
The understanding of landscape and history forms the basis for Danh’s chlorophyll printing process. His placement of images in nature suggests existence of a transcendent condition of memory-one that could supersede inexact memories generated by written histories and political agendas. The ideal of an omnipresent memory is perhaps rooted in a human desire to learn from history as a foundation for advancing humanity. "Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting," (3) as Danh quoted bell hooks’ imperative on the connection of memory to reform.
Danh’s work is aligned with the struggle to maintain memory in its memorializing role. The sentiment emphasizes an important underlying philosophy for the artist that nothing ever dies, but is only transformed. "In Vietnam, we grow our rice and bury our ancestors on the same land-so, every time we eat the rice, they literally become part of us." (4) In this way, simple daily ritual goes beyond the activity of fulfilling bodily need, and becomes a nourishing act of both body and spirit.
The ideology that nothing ever dies is not just a central part of Danh’s spiritual belief but is key in appreciating the concept behind his unique process of reproducing Vietnam War-related photographs onto tropical plant forms using the natural process of photosynthesis. Danh recreates the faces of war casualties in reverent plant forms in acknowledgement of the jungle, which held them in their death. By using plants to imprint an image of life lost, Danh carefully preserves a belief in human worth. He positions images of war in nature to confirm the presence of the past in our daily lives. We are like the readers of Life magazine-nearly forty years later, held captive by Danh’s resurrection of the young men’s faces. Especially at a time when current deadly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to make headlines, we are reminded of the permanence of even one human life lost.
Danh refrains from politicizing his ideas of the Vietnam War, although he mentions that the "Vietnam War" is referred to as the "American War" in Vietnam. His work is primarily inspired by a philosophy that human memory is inextricably linked to the earth’s memory. In this context, memory becomes global rather than having nationalist or other political ideology as its base. His concept of elemental transmigration considers that all living things are composed of atoms, constantly recycled to perform new functions. As if completing a cyclical journey, images from One Week’s Dead reveal they are as much a part of Danh’s heritage as his works picturing Vietnamese or Cambodian victims of war. All images are grounded in a cultural belief of transformative life process and therefore are subject to renewal in the service of better understanding the war. "Since matter is neither created nor destroyed, but only transformed, the remnants of the Vietnam War live on forever in the Vietnamese landscape." (5)
We cannot be certain what, if any, lessons are learned by war, but Danh confronts us with the resonance of war itself. It is this encounter that offers a chance for change. Confronting the aftermath of war creates an opportunity to examine our history so we may take responsibility for the enduring memories, including residual documents of war, such as photographs.
In making art that searches out hard truths of the past to advance ideals of peace and promote understanding in the present, Danh employs the potent presence of historic images-their compelling meaning still held in suspense by unasked or unanswered questions. Rather than being caught in the pain of the past judgments, Danh shares an experience of looking back at the Vietnam War as one who takes no sides, and he reminds us that wars may end, but they are never over.
Laura A. Guth (c)2007
1.“Faces of the American Dead: One Week’s Dead,” Life magazine, no. 66 (June 27, 1969).
2. Barbara Baker Burrows, “Photography Transformed, 1960-1999,” American Photography: A Century of Images, PBS, 1999.
3.bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 145.
4.Binh Danh, in discussion with the author, September 2007.
5. Binh Danh, Artist Statement, www.kearnystreet.org/programs/special/vietnam/binh_danh.html
Binh Danh received his MFA from Stanford University in 2004 and has emerged as an artist of national importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and our collective memory of war, both in Viet Nam and Cambodia--work that, in his own words, deals with "mortality, memory, history, landscape, justice, evidence, and spirituality." His technique incorporates his invention of the chlorophyll printing process, in which photographic images appear embedded in leaves through the action of photosynthesis. His newer body of work focuses on the Daguerreotype process.
Binh Danh has been included in important exhibitions at museums across the country, as well as the collections of the Corcoran Art Gallery, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the deYoung Museum, and the George Eastman House, among many others. He received the 2010 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco, CA and Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ.
Binh Danh lives in San Jose, CA. He participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program in October 2006, and was featured in a solo exhibition in August 2007. His work can be viewed at http://www.binhdanh.com/.
