Homage to a Troubled Land

Los Angeles-based artist Long Nguyen creates deeply personal paintings with humanistic content at a time when contemporary art is often defined by ironic detachment. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of his work lies not in his expressive brushwork but rather in his use of veiled, dreamlike imagery. Nguyen summons the past on both a conscious and a subconscious level, incorporating themes of landscape, the human form, travel and transition, organs and fragments of the body, and aspects of nature, most significantly water, fire, and cyclones. Strangely beautiful, gritty, and tough, his paintings bathe in an aureate glow, like indelible reminders frozen in amber.

Born in 1958 in the seaside town of Nha Trang, South Vietnam, Nguyen came of age during the Vietnam War. He had planned to enroll in college to avoid being drafted into the army, however, he was forced to flee his country well before his 18th birthday. On April 29, 1975, when the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese communists, Nguyen and several relatives embarked on a weeklong journey that transported him to a new life in the United States. He gained passage on a cargo boat that transported him and nearly four thousand other passengers along the Saigon River to the Pacific Ocean. After being rescued at sea, transferred to refugee camps, and waiting patiently for months, eventually Nguyen took up residence in Memphis, Tennessee, where he attended high school and college. Because his English was not strong, Nguyen initially struggled in school, but he managed to graduate with a B.S. in civil engineering from the Christian Brothers College. Working in engineering and taking art classes at night, he soon realized that his true path was that of an artist, and he eventually moved to San Jose to live with his brothers. He enrolled in the graduate fine arts program at San Jose State University, and began developing his trademark highly emotive style, gradating with his M.F.A. in 1985.

"Homage to a Troubled Land" (1989) encompasses the coupled senses of irrevocable loss and yearning that Nguyen felt for Vietnam despite the undeniable advantages of his new life. Displaying rudimentary landscape characteristics, the painting portrays a ground the color of blood, built with layers of varied crimson hues and seen in cross section. The top two-thirds of the canvas, painted in a teal blue-green that alludes to water, is strewn with examples of Nguyen’s symbology—cyclones, plants, flowers, and organlike shapes. Near the top of the composition, an uneven row of glowing red forms may represent either an offering of eternal devotion for his country, rife with problems, or a series of illuminated memorial candles.