Binh Danh explores the ways farming communities adapt in response to the landscapes they encounter. Through portraiture and landscapes, he illustrates the paths that people carved from Vietnam to Louisiana and the traditions they carried and created along the way. Just as settlers before them brought their traditions and relationships to the land, the Vietnamese community of Louisiana has made its mark on the local landscape and been marked by it in return. To create his images, Danh uses the traditional daguerreotype process, which allows viewers to see their own reflections in the work. This merging of the self with the photographed landscape encourages
viewers to reflect on the challenges of assimilating and becoming overlooked, much like features in the landscape.
The title for this section of the exhibition comes from the Vietnamese word for green, màu xanh lá, which directly translates to the color of leaves, illustrating the central role that the natural landscape plays in many of our interpretations of the world. “Xanh, LA,” is a playful reimagining of the word intended to evoke a fictional place on the map.
Statement by Binh Danh
In Vietnamese, "xanh lá" means green leaves, and there are plenty sprouting out of the rich fertile soil of the New Orleans area. As a Vietnamese-American child growing up in California, the camouflage uniform worn by actors in Vietnam War Hollywood movies had haunted me in the innocence of my child’s mind, That color green was associated with war, military, and death; and Agent Orange deforestation.
Later in my adult life, the greenness of Vietnamese culture redeemed itself in my mother's garden, where Asian organic vegetables were grown to make the delicious Vietnamese meals that nourished my siblings and me. It was also where I had the idea of printing images in leaves through the action of photosynthesis that became one of my signature work as an artist. When I was invited to visit New Orleans, I was already wondering about what do Vietnamese people here grow, giving that the climate is humid subtropical, similar to what you would find in Southeast Asia. I marveled at what I saw in these gardens: hanging winter melon (bí dao), elephant ear stalk (bạc hà), red Thai chilies (ớt), rice paddy herb (ngò om), okra (đậu bắp), bitter melon (mướp đắng), and lemongrass. The lemongrass is quite significant, as it was one of my earliest memories as a child. I recalled my sisters carrying me as my family, and I gathered wild lemongrass growing along the highway in our first few weeks in America until a neighbor informed us that we should not do that. It was a survival skill that we carried with us when we left the refugee camp in Malaysia, where gathering and fishing were to supplement the ration given by the UN Refugee Agency.
The garden portraits in this show represent the strength of the Vietnamese community and the ability of immigrants to adapt in their new homeland. Many of the participants expressed the reason why they care for a garden is to watch it blossom, nothing more and nothing less, and it gives them peace of mind to connect with the land and air.
