KVT – Three Songs of Bopha Xorigia Le Huy Hoang – Part 3

SONGLINES

I have seen three extraordinary songlines created by artist Bopha Xorigia Le Huy Hoang. Each of these sang the songs of where he’d come from, where he was.

Now that two months have passed since his death of cancer, just before Tet, 2014, I conclude my tributes to this important Vietnamese artist by revisiting the last of the landmarks that he installed as he drew a route through his personal landscape.

The songlines of this honest and gentle man were woven and interlaced with and traced over and around the ballads created in his life by his wife Lien Hoa, his daughter Chieu Dung, his mother Nguyet Uyen, his close family members, and loyal friends epitomized by those such as Pham Ngoc Duong who was with Hoang up to the time of his death.

PART THREE: SONG OF THE WALL

For a long time Hoang had a vision of creating a wall of bones that would be a metaphor for the genocide of millions of Cambodians by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, a genocide that encompassed thousands of ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia and in border areas. Hoang’s powerful motivation for such an art piece is suggested in Song of the Scarf.

Hoang knew that his Wall could not be constructed of the bones of humans so he collected the bleached bones of domestic mammals to represent the confronting reality of skulls and skeletal remains graphically piled in memorials on the Cambodian Killing Fields and in Vietnamese villages where slaughters took place, such as that at Ba Chuc where a hexagonal memorial commemorates the 3 175 Vietnamese civilians killed in 1978

Hoang’s Wall would have to be built specifically for the site that accepted his proposal and after a couple of tentative offers where the construction envisaged would have been extraordinarily different, the Goethe Institute in Hanoi with generous donations from the Danish Embassy’s Cultural Development and Exchange Fund, allowed the installation to be set up in their exhibition space

Opening: Fri 14 Dec, 6.30 pm
Exhibition: 15 Dec 2012 – 07 Jan 2013, 9 am – 7 pm
Goethe Institut

As with all the artist’s installations, the public reception was mixed and controversial…as it should have been. Many, like me, were held in awe. Some were repulsed. A few were under whelmed by the 4meter high and 10 meter long construction. One critic whom I respect described the art work as an aestheticization of suffering.

The olfactory effect was again a significant factor.

Hoang’s SCARF drew you into its dense aroma of sweet sugar and coffee. His RAIN was initially redolent of fresh growth and newly dug soil saturated with water. The WALL smelled heavily of old bones in ossuary’s and re-opened mass graves.

I returned several times to be within the shadows cast by the wall, in the muffled silence that its dense mass created, and in those rare times when I was alone with its contradictions and accords I felt honoured and humbled. It was a time of solitude when the weight of humankind’s calculated inhumanity to its fellow beings hung like a pall

Recently I saw a one man play presentation resonantly sounding out the songlines of Achilles… his lover Patroclus; his enemies Hector, Priam and Paris; and his allies Menelaus and Agamemnon…before genocide was wreaked on the citizens of Troy.

As the actor, Dennis O’Hare, pulled us into his Illiad under a starbright summer night sky, he’d sometimes turn onto his audience and almost accusatorily list the genocides that very recent history has manifested, and each struck a wincing blow in the mind’s solar plexus.

Afterwards I thought about how well Hoang’s wall would be as a setting for a play about one such genocide atrocity and that in its telling would similarly encompass all others.

In his comments about his installation, Hoang said that he realized that his Wall would be confrontational and he hoped it would shed some light on the ‘prejudices, discriminations and ignorances’ that form invisible and often intentional walls around us all.

Such are the prejudices, discriminations and ignorances that Hoang also saw as causing the building of modern walls that his could stand as a metaphor for all of the walls that continue to be built every day, somewhere in the world….. exampled by this link….that along the US/Mexican border….the one that runs through disputed desert lands between Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania…those in the city of Homs in Syria…the Indian built 2500km barbed wire fence around Bangladesh…the Brazilian wall that protects the rich from the poor in Alphaville, Sao Paulo….the Israelii West Bank wall that takes land from Palestinians….the wall near the Evros river in Greece that was built to keep out ‘third world immigrants’….the 99 walls in Northern Ireland cities that separate Protestant and Catholic working class communities…. The demilitarized zone on the 38th parallel between North and South Korea….the wall around the Spanish enclave of Melilla and Moroccan border towns in North Africa….the barrier of water washing around Northern Australia from which refugees are plucked and placed in rugged detention camps outside its borders-and which are usually surrounded by their own fences to protect the sensibilities of the paranoid.

Hoang would concur with Robert Frost and remind us that:

‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’

END SONG

I will miss experiencing the songlines that were singing their melodies inside Hoang’s head and which have been silenced far too early.

It has been an honour to have been able to compose my personal, public eulogy to praise the life and work…. and in this case, the compassion and gentle spirituality…of a very important Vietnamese artist.

Read more of KVT’s tributes to artist Le Huy Hoang:

KVT – Three Songs of Bopha Xorigia Le Huy Hoang – Part 1: Scarf
KVT – Three Songs of Bopha Xorigia Le Huy Hoang – Part 2: Rain