Countywide : Refugee Art Sheds Light on Camps

In one watercolor painting, two young lovers separated by a barbed wire fence touch hands through the mesh. In another, skeletal men and women stagger away from a distant city, carrying their dead and dying.

Drawn by Vietnamese adults and children interned at the Whitehead Detention Center in Hong Kong, the paintings are from a program aimed at giving the refugees a voice to the outside world and alleviating the “depressing and suffocating” boredom that permeates the camp, according to Bang Nguyen, the program’s co-chair.

About 75 of the paintings created by current residents of the Whitehead camp, depicting their flight from Vietnam, their present crowded living conditions and dreams of emigrating to the West, will be displayed locally to encourage donations to provide relief for the refugees.

The artwork will be shown today and Sunday at the Asian Gardens Mall in Westminster and on May 9 at UC Irvine.

Project Ngoc, a Vietnamese advocacy group run by UCI students, provides encouragement and art supplies to Vietnamese boat people living in refugee camps throughout the Pacific Rim. The group also informs the public locally about the plight of Vietnamese fleeing political persecution, Nguyen said.

Every summer, Project Ngoc sends as many as four volunteers to help teach and organize recreational activities to combat the sprit-crushing boredom in the camps. “What we try to do is find the human factor, and give them something to do,” Nguyen said.

Members of the project also send art supplies throughout the year. Paper, writing and drawing materials are in high demand in the camps because they do not have organized recreational or educational programs. Many people are forced to write poems on toilet tissue.

“The artists asked us to bring back art to show that (they) are people. They’re not just this faceless entity. . . . It’s very important for them to know that people in the outside world have not forgotten them (and) that people still care,” he said.

More than 10,000 people live at the Whitehead camp, each waiting to be judged as political refugees by a United Nations screening process, which takes years in most cases. Those who cannot prove they have been persecuted may be forced back to Vietnam.

Nguyen called the atmosphere at Whitehead and at other camps like it “depressing and suffocating. They spend all day lying in the barracks because there’s nothing to do. . . . Some people have waited there as long as eight years” for their case to be decided.

Common art themes include the fear of forced repatriation, squalid barrack housing, the perilous escape by boat from Vietnam and the dream of eventual freedom. The content and style of the artworks make the refugees’ dread of their condition readily apparent. One painting symbolizing the refugees’ loss of their homeland depicts a child crawling onto the bloody body of its mother and reads, “No milk today and no mother in the future.”

A crayon drawing made by a 10-year-old artist shows people under a giant dragon costume dancing during an autumn harvest festival in the camps. In the background, barbed wire surrounds the scene.