A surprise from my home land

Nguyen Dinh Dang
physicist and painter

 

In the past, Vietnam has been a country, which was at the center of the world’s attention due to two great wars with France and with the USA both ended with the total withdrawal of the French and American armies.

In the recent years the economic development of this country has made it a hot spot of tourism in the region. Some even say that, after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 on the US, Vietnam has become one of the safest places for tourists to go. The big cities in Vietnam such as Hanoi and Saigon are flooded with young Japanese ladies, who came to enjoy exotic sightseeing and cheap shopping.

It is really easy nowadays to see many pictures of Vietnam in various flashy photo albums, tourist guidebooks, and on the Internet. Most of them stereotype the country with a bundle of photos featuring young girls in traditional "ao dzai", the streets overcrowded with people on Japanese motorbikes, the ancient Hanoi old quarter, Buddhist temples, noisy markets, people from mountainous areas, etc.

Mr. Osami Arikata has chosen to show Vietnam at a new angle. A traveler in several countries including such large one like China, or such hot spot like Afghanistan, Mr. Osami has selected the best works from hundreds, may be thousands of photos, which he shot during his eleven trips to Vietnam. They show us one of the most important aspects in the life of Vietnamese people, namely the place where they are living, their houses. Vietnamese endured continuous wars in the past also just to protect their own houses, which stand as a symbol of their own right to live.

Although the major part of the photos presents mainly the houses in the provinces of the southern part of Vietnam, they show how the strength of survival is booming with the growth of economy. In this narrow country of more than seventy million of population, men had to mobilize all of their skills to combine the elements of the unique French colonial architecture with the small areas of land on which their houses are standing. New houses in the cities and provinces were built vertically, mostly one room on top of another. Most of them violate the golden proportion, which seems to be basic in the architecture of old colonial houses.

Still, the echo of the past can be heard somewhere nearby. You hear it when you see an old villa at the border of the West lake in Hanoi, which was decaying already during my childhood, has been now renovated, and stands out with all of the luxury of its glorious past. This house might have been a witness of a lot of changes and turbulence in the country. It remains by itself a symbol of these changes. In the French colonial time, it was probably inhabited with a French household or a rich Vietnamese lawyer (or medical doctor, etc.). During the "reform" in 1956 — 1960 it was split to give space to many families of "can bo" (employees of government sectors). In these days of economic boom, once again, it has been purchased and renovated by a nouveau-riche, or a foreign company.

The past comes back suddenly on the walls full of bullet holes in a destroyed church, which is now standing quietly under the tropical sunshine. Taken with the vanishing point at the center, the linear perspective of this devastating composition with three little girls playing in the middle gives this work some surrealistic essence with a very strong symbolism. The surrealism key also sounds in another picture with a small altar on the shore in front of the ocean. I found it a symbol of faith despite of the multiple hardships, which my people have been enduring.

At a whole this collection of monochrome photos is a nice surprise, a surprise that the eyes of a Japanese artist have captured these things, so usual for a Vietnamese like me, and transformed them into a surprise.