From the Streets of Resistance to the Walls of the Gallery: The From Vietnam to Berlin Exhibition at the ACC

Written and photographed by Saul Latham

The world has acted out, written down, and turned over many pages of political resistance.

From Vietnam to Berlin skims back through some of these pages to open up a conversation about the role of art in political upheaval. The March–July exhibition at the Asia Cultural Center featured around 170 paintings, drawings, and engravings by 50 artists who lived through and documented moments in and between the Vietnam War and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

From the comfort of a superbly designed Asia Cultural Center (ACC) exhibition space, I meandered through a reappraisal of protest art that, piece by piece, pictured visceral musings with subversive motifs, showing the humiliation, misery, and joy of humans coming together to fight oppressive power. At times, it was horrifying. At times, it was satirical and even funny. Almost always, it was clever; and necessarily so, given the function of the art. Resistance is the commonality between these works. It may be claimed as an art form, and art may be seen as always being resistant – but not all art is political.

Art has all sorts of functions and values. It can idealize, romanticize, and inspire. Pragmatically, art can cover up our mistakes; it can soften the abrasive edges of our technologies, buildings, personalities, relationships, and histories. We can make art, show art, sell art, and buy into art. Across the road on Chungjang-ro (충장로), art plays all its tricks. Abstracted consumers go after the promises of abstract principles in a ceremonial observance of individualism, the free market, and artistic expression.

The works on display at this exhibition were certainly political. Individually they pry open the gates of our historical reflections. Collectively they ask questions of our perspectives on current societal landscapes. Chronologically, the works were hung from a series of mirrored walls designed to reflect questions about paradigm, time, place, and interconnectedness. They depict an era of human tragedy: from imperial occupation by Japan, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and civil rights movements through dictatorships, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and beyond into new-millennium representations of resistance iconography.

In the dissident spirit of the artists whose work I am trying to relate, I will not review these works in chronological order. Instead, I will start with the here and now – Gwangju, 2018. As a young Maori man once said to me on the street, “It’s not where you’re from that matters – it’s where you’re at.”

Gwangju: the city of democracy. This area is a fascinating and inspiring part of Korea. Near the fountain, on the very site of the former provincial office that landmarked a pivotal fight for democracy in 1980, is the ACC. In that year, South Korean artist Hong Seong-dam (홍성담) was here unified with his people in dedicated protest. Thirty-eight years on, his series of woodcuts have hung just a stone’s throw away from the fountain in Theatre No. 3. These works were produced in 1989 and subsequently led to the artist’s imprisonment. They record the enormous sacrifice that was made by common people. Hong evokes strong emotions using a uniquely dynamic style of simple cuts to show the spectrum of humanity in those moments. We see beating and torture, fire, pregnancy, and suicide; we see joy, celebration, and a unified spirit. We see an important, organic normality often overlooked by resistance narratives.

Resistance art seeks to articulate alternative narrative courses. It seeks to deconstruct the hierarchies of unpreferred established culture. Compared with institutionalized art, these works and their makers have a different relationship with the public. So, should they become institutionalized, would the art in them remain resistant?

I wondered if these paintings belonged in the exhibition hall – or if by being there, they had changed at all. I wondered if the sparks of resistance these works once flamed were suffocated in such a conventional environment. Still more, I wondered if this collection enlightened me at all as to the process, means, or condition of current protest art. Certainly, current resistance art is rarely shown by galleries until after the fact and often, if identified as such, is rejected by institutions. It is the working class, the proletariat, non-conformists, spontaneous activists, and impromptu artists that own and show resistance art.

The struggle of the working class was a common thread throughout this exhibition. Renato Habulan’s large oil painting, Fullness of Time, uses realism to depict the ordinary yet heroic humanity of Filipino farmers who overcame a dictatorship. Set in a portrait frame, the image appears like a family photo. Behind the sky is yellow and red. I could not be sure if the sun was rising or setting.

Marx Brothers (1985) is a succinct message in red, black, and white paint applied with expression and disdain. Three bloodied, disfigured faces are bestialized against a white background. The title hints at their identity.

The oil paints in The Tale of Akebono Village (1953) present Yamashita Kikuji’s vision of real events between controlling classes and the common farmer. A murdered activist lies face down in a pool of blood and beside a suicided grandmother hangs. Kikuji was part of a movement of Japanese painters that sought to reveal the contradictions of postwar Japan and the afflictions of its people. Known as Reportage, this cell operated from the frontlines of political upheaval wielding sketchbooks and pencils. Unlike the journalists and writers stumbling over economic and political pressure, fumbling truth and running from deadlines, these artists produced a slow qualitative approach to expression of the incumbent human condition.

Other such groups are represented here, too. Coopérative des Malassis shares a massive 21-canvas stretch of the exhibition space. Le Grand Méchoui (1972) is a surrealist’s dream that criticizes the consumerist trends of French society and its ruling class during the 1960s.

A diverse range of styles gave this exhibition spice and surprise. Alongside moody abstracts and blunt realism were pop-art, expressionism, and a vast array of cultural trimmings. Most exciting to me was the site of Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair (1971). Having turned from the popular pleasures of his previous prints, Warhol began musing on death by using grotesque photographs from tabloid newspapers. The bright colors and off-register contours in this piece charge the image with a visual electricity that relates the grim reality of the scene.

Bernard Rancillac’s Melody Under the Palm Trees (1965) is a rearrangement of pop-art’s figurative messages. In brilliant color, a typecast bikini-clad blonde woman stands under exotic palms trees. Rancillac flips the image upside down. Underneath a fully loaded bomber screams through the air. Here two frames are juxtaposed in one, showing the fragility of capitalist romanticism turned on its head by the reality of war. It is a slap in the face to a Western world busy daydreaming. It is paradise lost: war in Vietnam.

Experientially, “The Torture Room” or La Torture by Group Denuncia was perhaps the most unique work of the exhibition. Behind the black curtains, I enter an octagon-shaped room in the middle of which sits a solitary stool. Surrounding me are seven paintings, in each of which a naked man is tortured as described in the diary of the Brazilian victim. I see electric wire stuck in holes, blindfolds, buckets of water, skin, and flesh, all set against a black background. It is a seriously moody subject. I am left questioning both the inhumanity of the torturers and the humanity and purpose of this experiential episode of art.

Amongst the airwaves, there is plenty of space at this exhibition for sound art also. Sung Ki-wan’s (성기완) Revolution Radio broadcasts the sounds and music of revolution and resistance between the 1960s and 1980s. It stands as an important piece of the resistance puzzle. The deep ability of music to bring people together is sensed by all.

The processes and materials used in this exhibition were as varied as the artists and their subjects. Willie Bester’s portraits of South African activists are as much crafted shrines as they are paintings. Bester uses objects to tell stories and add aesthetic meaning. In his portrait Chris Hani, a bicycle tire surrounds the hero’s head like a laurel wreath, bullets sit next to an AK-47, and a homemade guitar illustrates togetherness. In two other portraits on display, Bester uses sheep bones and buck horns amongst guns, parts of vacuum cleaners, a slingshot, cups, and photos from newspapers.

Otto Muehl’s wonderful abstract portraits, Strauss, Bush, and Reagan, were made using silk screen and include a messy and ambiguous self-portrait. Leon Golub used a meat cleaver to scrape paint, mimicking the violence he was depicting in the brutal realism of the 1984 work White Squad. Mickey Mouse and his friends are presented in Bernard Rancillac’s 1977 Bloody Comics, a satirical rendering of American geopolitics. The four Disney characters, in military suits hold a salute. Below, Popeye returns the salute wearing a hat on which is written “Jimmy.” This is a lampooning of America’s relationship with dictatorial Chile and a finger pointed at ignorance in both countries.

This exhibition raised questions about the role of institutions in shepherding and reinterpreting resistance art. In the sense that all writers or artists are propagandists – and certainly those who consciously politicize their art are – there was propaganda on the walls of the ACC. Yet, there were no propaganda works from regimes these upheavals opposed to balance the story.

The lack of female artists and subject matter became obvious by the final works. Certainly the lack of female antagonists of war tells us things about the masculine and feminine conditions, and suggests inclinations in our history telling.

The final pieces of this exhibition were paintings of deceased icons by Chinese contemporary expressionist painter Yan Pei Ming. The first subject is a dead Mao, followed by a dead Kennedy, and then a dead Che Guevara. These seem like obvious images with which to end, yet they seem a little tame in their depoliticized celebrity.

I shoulder the final corner of the mirror-plated exhibition walls and come to the final work: a large canvas portrait brushed in black and white oil paint with countless shades – a fluidity of grays. Martin Luther King is the last of Ming’s death portraits. It is an epilogue witnessing history through a “great man” lens – hardly revolutionary. I am surprised that there is no reinterpretation or reshuffling of paradigm here, given the character of the exhibition.

This art was about great individuals, but in the spirit of Gwangju it was more about communities. Proletarians wore resistance, having made it. Some died for it, some without it, and others tasted its sweet rewards. Artists recorded these resistances. Unknowns changed the course of events with acts and artistic works seen only in unwritten history. And what about our Earth’s place in it all? What about its story?

In the Gwangju outside of the exhibition was a beautiful summer’s day. The sky was blue. Children played freely in fountains of mist rising from the pavement. Couples relaxed in the shade of traditional shelters from neighboring Asian cultures. I walked over to the fountain at the center of it all. It shot water up in a beautiful unison of sight and sound. In front of it stood three graffitied boards, on one of which was an image of Kim Jong-un. Near this famous face were the words “peace,” “love,” and “no war.”

Peace and love are easy to write and worthy subjects on which to make art, but their existences are not always as simple as a choice. Sometimes it takes resistance, and resistance too can be beautiful and worthy of art. Peace and resistance go together like yin and yang. In order to keep peace, humans must be ready to resist oppression and in resisting we must remember peace. Integral with all this, art is a mirror for us all and ideally of us all. We need such art now and in the future. For there are many more pages of resistance to be written.

The Author
A Tasmanian writer of words and music, Saul Latham currently lives in Gwangju and is a big fan of free time. The best thing he has ever done is to run.