"No more do we take the long straight strides. Our steps have been shaped by the cage that kept us" Etherige Knight

For ten years her father lived a barbed-wired life. He endured nameless daily indignities as a prisoner of war in North Vienam in the shadow of the Yen Bai mountain.

"Once he had been an athlete, a brilliant, well-educated man, a commander in the South Vietnam Army. He was a graduate of a prestigious military academy, an equivalent of our West Point. He studied in France and the United States. More importantly, he was a devoted husband and father, and a good human being", tells Huong.

The Viet Cong captured him and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Prisoner of War is Huong's tribute to her father who died of lung cancer after enduring nine years of brutality and savage treatment in the hands of his Viet Cong Captors. At the same time that she pays homage to "Ba", she also pleads for all the prisoners of war in all countries at all times.

Initially, he was given three years, and the family pleaded with his brother who was a commander in the North Vietnamese army for clemency. He refused and instead said, "because he is my brother and a traitor to me, I extend it to ten years". And so, added to the tragic carnage of war, we add the broken families, the decayed dreams, the loss of conscience that melts away in war, and we recognize the there are some things worse than dying.

In this painting, Huong Pays tribute and honors her father by honoring all those who suffer in the degradation of war. She envisions him shouting at the moon, ever-present in her work. The inescapeable and palpitating presence of death lies before him, a reminder of his discaded hopes, a reminder that he was destined to die in a no man's world of devastated and burnt villages full of grieving mothers, of too many orphanages. Moss grows on the rocks indicating the length of time of his incarceration.

He spends this interminable season in hell forced to build his own prison wirh rocks and stones from the mountain, collecting wood for fires while barely subsisting on a diet of rice mixed with rat feces. He received no medical care and his condition was worse than that of a caged animal. The war painting is bordered in gold tones. the gold stes her father apart and honors this Asian man once told her, "Do not worry, Huong. The Boys may be bigger than you are smarter. Strength comes in many ways." "This" Huong says, "is coming from an Asian man with Asian customs. It takes a big man to tell a woman this. He taught me confidence and loving-kindness. It was he who introduced me to Art and to Picasso. On a return from France, he brought me a Picasso's painting of "the Three Musians". I kept that image with me all the way to America." He was allowed visits one time a year for one hour only. Huong's mother remembers seeing him, barefooted, rags covering skin and bones, his hands and legs veined by hard labor. What was not visible to the eye still existed-his mind and his spirit still prevailed. His will and his hope was that his family would one day come to America and be free.

His soul prints are embedded on this daughter's heart and on her canvases. One day, years later, an elderly man came to one of her exhibits. He was one of the men in her father's command. When he saw her work, he said "You are your father's daughter." And So that Child of war became this artist for peace.

Into the earth
the bloody seeds fall
Come the harvest
With the reaping
of its dead.
In the jungle green
moss gathers over
Blood-stained stones.
SW

Text By, Sandi Wicina, Curator of Arts
©2004. Art, War, and Peace Museum.