Current Exhibits

Binh Danh: The Botany of Biến Chuyển
Chlorophyll Prints – Vietnam and Cambodia

When:  Fri., Dec. 14, 2007 – Sun., March 2, 2008
Where:  Contemporary Trends Gallery
Conversation with Artist: Fri., Dec. 14, 3:30 pm

Two years after the close of the Vietnam War, Binh Danh was born in a fishing village of Vietnam’s southern region. In 1979, his family and he escaped on a boat and were relocated to the Malaysian refugee camp, Pula Bidong. Eventually as part of the “boat peoples” exodus, the Danh family immigrated to the United States and settled in San Jose, California. Danh was raised in a traditional Vietnamese household where many of the family’s Buddhist rituals focused on the worship of ancestors. Meditating on death and its influence on the living, the themes of mortality, memory and spirituality became the source for what has become Danh’s lifetime inspiration in his personal development as an artist.

As a college student, Danh developed a unique process for transferring photographic images onto the surfaces of leaves via photosynthesis, yielding what he terms as “chlorophyll prints.” At first this was an interesting and novel mode of expression for Danh as a young artist. It was his first return trip to Vietnam that catalyzed what would become a revelatory body of work. There, he was confronted by the subtle but ubiquitous physical remains of the war such as bomb craters that had been converted into rice paddies. He observed that the tacit memories of the war’s devastation were internalized in the daily life of the native people and the remaining soldiers who had fought in this war. In order to articulate his responses to the profound effects of war upon a people, Danh began to develop a series of chlorophyll prints of archival images of the Vietnam-American War. By using tropical leaves as the ground for these images he has created elegantly beautiful prints that celebrate the fragility of life and also serve as records of the political realities of recent history. Dahn’s visionary artwork shares with the viewer his own personal epiphany that the memory of these people will reverberate forever through the country’s landscape.

In the 2004 series The Killing Fields, Binh Danh has used the image of monarch butterflies and swallowtails as an element in his photographs along with the images of the faces of prisoners from Tuol Sleng, the detention center where the Khmer Rouge photographed, tortured and slaughtered more than 14,000 people between 1975 and 1979. No one in Cambodia could have imagined that photographs taken by the Khmer Rouge would be detached from the prisoners’ forced typed confessions, reappearing years later on the delicate surfaces of leaves. Scientists speculate that even the most insignificant acts form constellations of cause and effect that alter the course of history. They call this the “Butterfly Effect” because the beating of a butterfly’s wings can set off a tornado halfway around the world. The choices we make – whether to remember or to forget, to speak or to listen, to look or to turn away can have unforeseeable and often profound outcomes. The work of Binh Danh invokes fragments of the painful past but asks viewers to consider how our actions are continuously shaping the future.

In the work of Binh Danh, we are confronted with a reconstruction of familial memory where political and personal history has been emotionally fused. As a Vietnamese-born artist, he has fabricated historical imagery with his own familial story of a war-torn homeland that he never knew. His innovative technique of the chlorophyll print that literally “grows” images of war into leaves that are then suspended in resin underscores memory’s fragility, its organic nature, and the human need to remember one’s own history.

Exhibits Underwriters

We appreciate the generosity of the following organizations and individuals for sponsoring the Winter Exhibitions at FAM:

  • James and Coke Hallowell
  • Dumont Printing
  • Electric Motor Shop
  • Bonner Family Foundation
  • Women's League
  • Harriett R. Stratton Trust
  • Mrs. Jane Cleave