All images (C) Howard Henry Chen. Courtesy of the artist and Schneider Gallery, Chicago "Tusks No. 2, Suoi Tien Amusement Park, Ho Chi Minh City."

By Mary Thomas
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette A wall-sized, colorful image of a towering dragon and phoenix in a Ho Chi Minh City amusement park is juxtaposed with that of a flip-flop-shod tourist photographing a downed Chinook helicopter mounted on a brick platform on a scantily forested hill.

It is not often that an art exhibition effortlessly, almost unintentionally, straddles realism and surrealism while exploring the current ramifications of an historic event and relates obliquely to a heated contemporary conversation.

"Multiple Entry Visa: To Vietnam and Back," at Silver Eye Center for Photography, is such a show.

"Fernando and Sylvie reading the Lonely Planet at The War Remnants Museum (formerly The Museum of American War Crimes, but the People's Committee of Ho Chi Minh City changed the name sometime after Hanoi and Washington normalized relations,) Ho Chi Minh City." Click photo for larger image.

The photographs were taken by Chicago resident Howard Henry Chen, who was born in Vietnam and moved to the United States with his family in 1975 when he was 3 -- "a few weeks before the tanks rolled in."

Chen, a Boston University journalism and political science graduate who's worked at several newspapers and recently earned an MFA, has been visiting Vietnam for half a dozen years. Before his first trip back, his parents contacted relatives with whom Chen hadn't been in touch for nearly 30 years. Loosely labeling them all "cousins," he now tours the country with them.

One of his more unexpected discoveries was how his relatives think -- or don't -- about the war. There is a "bifurcated view," Chen says. We're still in a stage of "historical puberty" while the Vietnamese don't think about it, being more concerned with current economic opportunities. Also, they weave the American involvement into a century of war in Indochina, flanked by altercations with the French and the Chinese.

Like most Americans, Chen's notions of Vietnam were shaped by "the larger popular culture in America. We made school trips to the Vietnam War Memorial, and vets came to talk to the class on Veterans Day." He saw movies such as "Rambo," "Apocalypse Now" and "The Deer Hunter."

Chen says that before going back he had conversations in his head about the war and wondered whether the Vietnamese had forgiven us. What he found was that "the forgiveness took place years ago, and they're moving ahead" with recent 8 1/2 percent growth fueled by globalization.

When he first visited, he felt a "little bit of survivor's guilt," Chen says, with his camera and cash and freedom to travel, and he would help his relatives with such things as money for school. Now, they're employed by multinationals and they pick him up in a car with a driver and pay the dinner tab.

	"Tyrannosaurus and Brontosaurus (after W. Eugene Smith)," Tam Sen Cultural Park, Ho Chi Minh City." Click photo for larger image. "Multiple Entry Visa: To Vietnam and Back" Where: Silver Eye Center for Photography, 1015 E. Carson St., South Side. When: Through Feb. 10. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and until 9 p.m. Thursdays. Admission: Free. Talks: 7 p.m. Friday, National Geographic photographers Melissa Farlow and Randy Olson discuss recent international projects; 7 p.m. Feb. 9, Samuel W. Black, Heinz History Center curator of the exhibition "Soul Soldiers," speaks on "An African American Perspective: Soldiers in Vietnam." Admission, reservations recommended. Information: 412-431-1810 or www.silvereye.org.

As an artist with a unique combination of experience, Chen says he hoped through his work "to show what was really going on. I felt a responsibility to acknowledge that there was this war but that the dialogue and discourse there was different than what we felt it would be."

Still, when looking at a "Replica of tunnel bunker used by Viet Cong guerrillas" that's been reconstructed and enlarged for foreign tourists because they're too oversized to fit, it's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

Another aspect of the exhibition is the unspoken relationship it has to our current conflict. One reason exhibition juror Rod Slemmons chose Chen, he writes, was for the topicality of the photographs -- "their reference to and elucidation of the current American embroilment in Iraq."

Chen allows that it's "natural for an American audience to make the tie-in because it's obviously on everybody's mind."

The fine detail in the images -- the result of using a large-format 4-by-5 field camera -- makes them more realistic and lends emphasis to their underlying grittiness. Chen scans the photographs into a computer and prints them on an Epson 9800 printer, their large scale also serving to pull the viewer into the moment.

The saturated color, intensified in Photoshop, is ultra-real and illusory, but it feeds a stereotype. Often when picturing Vietnam, Chen says, "a level of exotica creeps in -- lush jungles, ripe fruit. I wanted to play into that," seducing the viewer through sensuality.

Then, Chen says, you begin to notice the Ford dealership in the background, or the Pepsi logos on the table umbrellas at The War Remnants Museum (The Museum of American War Crimes before normalization of relations between Hanoi and Washington) where visitors "Fernando and Sylvie" sit reading a Lonely Planet guide.

The lack of alignment of a scene across diptych or triptych panels (themselves a reference to traditional Vietnamese lacquer painting) underscores the disjunct in the cultural experience portrayed. It's a physical complement to what happens subconsciously when looking at the Vietnamese children rounding a curve in a "Space Shuttle" ride emblazoned with American flags and the words "United States."

Pittsburgh artist Bob Karstadt recently quipped that given the current global state of affairs, he felt as if he was living in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. It's also an apt analogy for the sensation one gets while standing in this visually gorgeous and perceptually unsettling show.

The exhibition is one component of the Center's annual fellowship award, which also includes $5,000. Chen was selected from 284 submissions that arrived from 36 states and two foreign countries by juror Slemmons, director of The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago.

One photograph by each of 10 Honorable Mention photographers is also displayed. They are Susan Bank, Carol Golemboski, Sarah Hoskins, Darlene Kaczmarczyk, Rania Matar, Elizabeth Raymer, Daniel Salitrik (of Uniontown), Steve Simon, Brian Smetak (Pittsburgh), and Jeffrey Louviere and Vanessa Brown. Chen received an Honorable Mention in last year's competition.

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Chen writes: "My Vietnamese cousin on his first trip to see the grounded Huey in Ho Chi Minh City (Me: "What?! Twenty-six years and you've never been here?' to which he replies: "What's this stuff got to do with me?' He had a point.)"