Vietnam, Past Is Prologue (March - September 2019) is Chung’s most ambitious exploration of the war in Vietnam and its aftermath to date – with an approach that mirrors the multiplicity of her subject, subsuming her own voice to those of others and tackling her theme from various perspectives. The project stems from the facts of her own life: Chung’s father was a pilot in the South Vietnamese army who fought alongside American forces and was taken prisoner for 14 years in North Vietnam. The family immigrated to the U.S. as part of the post-1975 exodus from that country.  Chung examines the narratives that have been used to understand the war and its aftermath, and probes how the America we know today was shaped by Vietnam. The exhibition was presented in conjunction with Smithsonian American Art Museum’s major exhibition Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975.

 Based in painstaking primary research, Vietnam, Past Is Prologue is broad and richly textured, illuminating both the war’s grand scale and the personal stakes of people affected by it. The exhibition features a new series of video interviews with former Vietnamese refugees in Houston, Southern California, and Northern Virginia that has been commissioned by the museum for this exhibition.  It also includes photographs, watercolors, texts, and hand-drawn maps that trace military strategies and refugee resettlement patterns.  Through this work, Chung documents accounts that have largely been left out of official histories of the period and begins to tell an alternative story of the war’s ideology and effects.  In the process, she reframes our understanding of how the contemporary world has been formed.

The exhibition was organized by Sarah Newman, James Dicke curator of contemporary art, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
[Above text is an edited excerpt from exhibition texts written by Newman.]