Vietnam war art collected over 30 years paints a very different picture of communist fighters
- ‘Vietnam: The Art of War’ project aims to document the world-shaking conflict from a Vietnamese perspective
- Far from the biased interpretation of red-eyed bogeymen, North Vietnamese artists portrayed Viet Cong fighters as intelligent, expressive individuals
Ambushed and captured by Vietnamese communist guerillas, French journalist Georges Petwhenier was one of the few Westerners to see Viet Cong fighters in their element as they fought US soldiers and their South Vietnamese allies during the Vietnam war. He described their jungle sanctuary in an article in The New York Times published in 1964.
“In comparison with the Vietnamese jungle, the bayous of [US state] Louisiana are like an English garden. Tormented by mosquitoes, ants and ticks, one must hack painfully through with a machete, crawl here, climb there and ford streams infested by leeches. It is a living hell,” he wrote.
North Vietnamese war artists painted a very different picture of the country’s jungles, and communists, however, as illustrated in a project titled “Vietnam: The Art of War”.
The project was curated by researchers who had comprehensive access to archives at the Witness Collection, one of the world’s largest collections of Vietnamese art. Aiming to document the world-shaking conflict from a Vietnamese perspective, it incorporates war art from the country collected over more than 30 years.
Northern troops’ mastery of the natural environment contributed greatly to their successful fight for a unified and independent Vietnam.
While marching in the mountains of Quang Tri province in 1972, war artist Nguyen Duc Tho came across a jungle-based team providing food to anti-aircraft artillery units stationed nearby. Continually threatened by American B52 bombers, the troops needed two vital elements: camouflage and shelter. The jungle provided – in the form of a gigantic, hollowed-out dead tree.
