Existing comment:
The Vietnam Exodus Project:
reconstructing history from fragmented records and half-lived lives
Here Chung takes a broad view of thelegacy of the War, focusing on collective experience and transmuting personal memory into an expanded official history. With maps, documents, and watercolors, she offers a model for how an individual can engage with history and global trauma writ large.
In the center of the gallery are documents from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, where Chung researched largely unstudied records from agencies that dealt with Vietnamese migrants. Along with her interviews of resettled people,Chung used the information she collected to understand the breadth of migration and create maps that show a new, fuller view of how the contemporary world was formed.
Viewed in accumulation, Chung's work questions what we know about the Vietnam War. Illuminating the malleability of memory and the foreignness of the past, she interrogates how we understand history as much as its agreed-upon facts. We come away comprehending less and understanding more. |