Vietnamese Refugee Art Expected to Return to Shatin, Hong Kong from Refuge Abroad

Art from Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong's detention camps in the aftermath of the "boatpeople" crisis will likely return to Hong Kong soon. The route is circuitous, from Shatin and likely back to Shatin with a detour to Europe. It went from Whitehead detention camp in Shatin to a major archive in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and is likely to come back to Hong Kong, to Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shatin.

Samson Wong interviewed 6 November 2017 in Ma On Shan, Hong Kong

Photo collage copyright © Daniel C. Tsang 2017

We talk with Samson Wong (left), an Education University community arts guest lecturer (Ph.D, Lingnan University, 2016) about the history of this artwork and why it is the "right time" to return it to Hong Kong.  To listen to the interview, aired as a podcast on the KUCI Subversity Show Online, click here.

Roundtable discussion “permanent in-transit”

at Spring Workshop 5 November 2017

Despite the uncertainty about the future of Hong Kong under the One Country Two Systems formula under the Peoples Republic of China, Wong believes in the last five or so years, there has been renewed interest in Hong Kong history and in documenting the experiences of the people here.  Indeed, the day before I interviewed him, Spring Workshop, an arts center in Wong Chuk Hang, Aberdeen, held a forum with former Vietnamese refugees that have settled in Hong Kong, and attorneys associated with the late Pam Baker, a former Hong Kong civil servant turned human rights lawyer who boldly pushed for the rights of asylum seekers and refugees in colonial Hong Kong and later in post-1997 Hong Kong.  The forum, organized by Tiffany Chung, was meant to be a tribute to Baker, who died in the UK in 2002.  The workshop also is hosting an exhibit on Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong.

Wong, working with Garden Streams' Evelyna Liang Yee-woo, was instrumental in the shipping to Amsterdam of the 800 pieces of artwork that had been collected by Garden Streams, a Hong Kong-based Christian Artists Fellowship, that went into the detention camps and helped children and youth with art lessons etc.  At the time, it was thought that the Amsterdam-based International Institute of Social History (IISH) was the best place to keep the artwork temporarily (for up to 10 years according to a signed contract) for "safekeeping".  It is the largest archive of contemporary social and political movement materials. Wong a few years ago, in fact took me to the warehouse where the artwork, some framed, was stored, awaiting shipment abroad.

Umbrellas featured in Whitehead Detention Centre, Shatin.

Predating Umbrella Movement! Artist: Tang Nga Son.

Refugees in Whitehead retrieving basketball amid barbed wire.

Artist: Tang Nga Son

According to the entry in the catalogue (typos corrected), "This collection is about artworks by Vietnamese refugees and asylum-seekers made during their detention in Hong Kong; in the late 1980s as many as 50.000 Vietnamese asylum seekers lived in detention camps in Hong Kong; these camps were a prison-like environment with a bleak sense of hope, bearing various fears and tragic memories; between 1989 and 1993, funded by UN, a 3-year art project was conducted in these detention camps; the local artist group Garden Streams Hong Kong Fellowship of Christian Artists entered several detention camps to hold various visual and performance arts activities, supported the Freedom Magazine (Tu Do) and also a women craft income generation project; the programme, entitled 'Art in the Camps', bordered on social service, activism, therapeutic art and art education; it was one of Hong Kong's earliest organized services initiated by artists, which in turn inspired future local community art programmes; the last detention camp closed in 2001; afterwards Garden Streams co-hosted the 'C.A.R.E. Local Vietnamese Community Art Re-encountered' exhibition and seminar series with the Lingnan University in Hong Kong, and subsequently provided the collection for research by Sophia Law, assistant professor at Lingnan's Visual Studies Department, from 2009 to 2010; the collection was shipped to the IISH in 2011."  A content note adds: "About 800 artworks from Vietnamese boatrefugees and documentation, photo's and interviews on life in the Hong Kong refugee camps 1989-1993 (-2010)."

Women refugees wash their hair in Whitehead.

Artist:  Nguyen Thi Vien

Refugees stage protests over asylum process at Whitehead.

Artist: Le Khac Dat

According to Wong, the local group had trouble initially exhibiting items from the collection in Hong Kong, with the Central Public Library, saying it could not be fit into its schedule.  Wong says the group also had a mixed reaction from artists from Vietnam it wanted to include in the exhibit, with one artists enthusiastic, another much more cautious.  Also skeptical was Vietnam's Consulate, which suggested that the group include other artwork from Vietnam, rather than those of the refugees from the camps, who after all, had escaped from socialist Vietnam.  In the end a "successful" exhibit of some 200 items of artwork, photographs and documents was held at Lingnan University. A later exhibit of 40 items was also shown at the Hong Kong (then) Institute of Education. (It recently became a University.)

Coming from University of California, Irvine, which currently hosts the most accessible collection of artwork from the detention camps in Hong Kong, although with much fewer pieces of artwork, I was interested in how Wong, who has visited UCI's Southeast Asian Archive and compared selected artists paintings with the several hundred archived in California, collected as a result of UCI students in Project Ngoc who visited Hong Kong to help refugee kids in the camp.  Some of the UCI collection is featured in a chapter I wrote (described in this earlier blog entry, where the artwork is shown in color).  I also interviewed Sophia Law when she visited UCI and Little Saigon.

Refugees seek human rights at Whitehead.

Artist: Le Khac Dat

Wong believes the UCI collection has more "polished" art, given he noticed that there were fundraising efforts where some artwork initially sent abroad were auctioned off to raise money for asylum cases in Hong Kong and elsewhere.  The Garden Streams collection could well contain earlier versions of the same artists' work that ended up in Irvine.  Wong believes that is fine given that scholars would use the collection to trace the development of the artwork over time. Indeed, at 800-plus items of artwork, the Garden Streams collection dwarfs the UCI collection.

Given that the Chinese University of Hong Kong's Fine Arts Department and scholars there have expressed interest in using the collection, Wong is hopeful it will soon be returned and find a home at CUHK.  He notes that a CUHK post-graduate student had visited Amsterdam to attempt to use the collection there.  -- Daniel C. Tsang

Thanks to Samson Wong for providing copies of the Garden Streams artwork to illustrate this blog.

Visions of Resistance and Survival: Looking Back at the Hong Kong Vietnamese Detention Camps

Figure 8.3 Hope of Freedom. Original by Trinh Quoc Lan, artist. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Project Ngoc Records on Southeast Asian Refugees (MS-SEA016).

My article on the artwork and literature from the Hong Kong Detention Camps after the Vietnamese boat people exodus is now out as a book chapter.

The chapter is: "Visions of resistance and survival from Hong Kong detention camps." It's chapter 8, pp. 99-115 in the book, Chinese/Vietnamese Diaspora: Revisiting the Boat People, edited by Yuk Wah Chan of City University of Hong Kong, from Routledge. It is the outgrowth of a workshop I was graced to attend at City University of Hong Kong back in October 2009.


The essay analyzes in detail just some of the artwork and literature from the refugee detention camps in Hong Kong, preserved in the Paul Tran and Project Ngoc Papers, originally given to University of California, Irvine's, Southeast Asian Archive, then under Anne Frank.

I write on the "barbed wire" theme and there are extended references to variations of the "chicken wing" metaphor. There is also a page on the Project Ngoc's "Proposal for Libraries in Refugee Camps." I also include figures on ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who were admitted to Hong Kong. The strange thing is when they arrive in the United States, their Chinese ethnicity is erased and they are treated as Vietnamese refugees. In total, almost half a million ethnic Chinese left Vietnam before September 1979, and at one point, some 60-70 percent of the boat people were ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, according to another contributor to the book, Ramses Amer. In my chapter, there are 25 citations (see below) including several to UC Irvine Libraries' Special Collections and Archives finding aids: Guide to the Paul Tran Files on Southeast Asian Refugees and Guide to the Project Ngoc Records.

Figure 8.4. Camp protesters. Original by Pham Tien Dung, artist. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine. Paul Tran Files (MS-SEA002).

Little Saigon community activist Paul Tran donated much of the materials from the Detention Centers to UC Irvine. The book notes: "When the material were given to Mr. Tran at the time, the authors' intentions were to get their voices heard in the outside world, and the materials were not meant to be sold commercially." Project Ngoc was a student group that sent UC Irvine students and other volunteers to help out the refugees in the camps. I hope this essay sparks further research interest in the collection.

Figure 8.6 Forced repatriation. Original by Tran Ngoc Dong, artist. Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine Libraries. Paul Tran Files (MS-SEA002).

There is more meaty stuff in the volume, so hopefully your library will pick up the unfortunately pricey volume. I found myself learning a lot more about the topic, including that Cholon is misnamed as Saigon's Chinatown (read Li Tana's chapter). More information on the contents of the volume is
here:

Part I: Revisiting an era of Refugees and Boat People 1. Revisiting the Vietnamese Refugee Era: An Asian Perspective from Hong Kong - Yuk Wah Chan 2. Rethinking the Vietnamese Exodus: Hong Kong in Comparative Perspective - David W. Haines 3. The Boat People Crisis of 1978–1979 and the Hong Kong Experience Examined through the Ethnic Chinese Dimension - Ramses Amer 4. In Search of History: The Chinese in South Vietnam, 1945–1975 - Li Tana Part II: Hong Kong Vietnamese Boat People and Their Settlement 5. The Vietnamese Minority: Boatpeople Settlement in Hong Kong - Yuk Wah Chan And Terence C.T. Shum 6. Vietnamese Youth and Their Adaptation in Hong Kong - Ocean W. K. Chan 7. Thanh Loc- Hong Kong’s Refugee Screening System: From A Refugee Perspective - Peter Hansen 8. Visions of Resistance and Survival from Hong Kong Detention Camps - Daniel C. Tsang 9. Vietnamese Boat People in Hong Kong: Visual Images and Stories - Sophia Suk-Mun Law Part III: Hong Kong and Beyond 10. Sojourn in Hong Kong, Settlement in America: Experiences of Chinese-Vietnamese Refugees - Jonathan H.X. Lee 11. Dark Tourism, Diasporic Memory and Disappeared History: The Contested Meaning of the Former Indochinese Refugee Camp at Pulau Galang - Ashley Carruthers and Boitran Huynh-Beattie 12. The Repatriated – From Refugee Migration to Marriage Migration - Yuk Wah Chan 13. Epilogue - Yuk Wah Chan.

Another contributor visited UC Irvine and Little Saigon last year to talk about the detention camp artwork. Sophia Law, of Lingnam University in Hong Kong, was interviewed on Subversity then.

My thanks to Trinh Luu for helping with the translations.

To facilitate further research, here are the references in my article:

Amer, R. (1991) The Ethnic Vietnamese in Vietnam and Sino-Vietnamese relations,
Selangor: Forum.

Bale, C. (1990) 'Vietnamese boat People', in R.Y.C. Wong and lY.S. Cheng (eds), The
Other Hong Kong Report 1990, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. p. 171.

Brook, R. (1996) 'Arbitrary detention of Vietnamese asylum seekers', Hong Kong Human
Rights Monitor Newsletter, June, www.hkhrm.org.hk/english/reports/enw/enw0696b.
htm (accessed 7 September 2009).

Fassi, L. (2010) 'Terra incognita: Luigi Fassi on the art of Danh Vo', Artforum, 4S(6):152- 59.

Fujita-Rony, D. and Frank, A. (2003) 'Archiving histories: The Southeast Asian Archive at University of California, Irvine', Amerasia Journal, 29(3): 155.

Guide to the Paul Tran files on Southeast Asian refugees (2003) MS-SEA02, Special
Collections and Archives, University of California, Irvine, Libraries, www.oac.cdlib.
org/findaid/ark:113030/tfSf59pltgl (accessed 6 September 2009).

Guide to the Project Ngoc Records (2003) MS-SEA016, Special Co\1ections and Archives,
University of California, Irvine, Libraries, www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid /ark:1130301
ktSz09pSpd?query=Project%20Ngoc (accessed 30 August 2009).

Hong Kong Government (1991) 'Ethnic origins of arrivals' 1991, in Monthly statistical
report (arrivals and departures) (March), SRD 704/ 1/1, located in Project Ngoc
collection, MS-SEAOI6, Box 1, Folder 42, Special Collections and Archives, University
of California, Irvine, Libraries.

Hunt, P.G. (1996) 'Dragons and chicken wings: the anomalies of the involvement of
Vietnamese refugees in crime in Hong Kong, 1989- 95', Master thesis, University of
Hong Kong, http://hub.hku.hk/handleI123456789/25752 (accessed 8 May 2010).

Knudsen, J.C. (1992) Chicken Wings: Refugee Stories from a Concrete Hell,
Bergen: Magnat Forlag.

--(2005) Capricious Worlds: Vietnamese Life Journeys, Lit Verlag, Muenster.
Lam, A. (2005), Perfume Dreams, Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, Berkeley,
CA: Heyday Books.

Lam, L. (1994) 'Hong Kong Chinese: facing the political changes in 1997', in H.
Adelman (ed.), Legitimate and illegitimate Discrimination: New Issues in Migration,
Toronto: York Lanes Press, pp. 135- 52.

Law, S.S. (2008) 'Art in adversity-C.A.R.E. at Lingan University,' in Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook, Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, pp. 143-63.

Nguyen, C. (2000) 'Hainan, Hong Kong, and Tuen Mun camp', in M.T. Cargill and J.Q.
Huynh (eds), Voices of Vietnamese Boat People: Nineteen Narratives of Escape and
Survival, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 99- 106.

Project Ngoc (1988) The Forgotten People: Vietnamese Refugees in Hong Kong: A
Critical Report, Irvine, CA: The Project.

Robertson, G. (2002), 'Pam Baker: Hong Kong lawyer who fought for rights of
Vietnamese refugees', The Guardian, 27 April, www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/
apr/27/guardianobituaries (accessed 7 September 2009).

Rumbaut, R.G. (2007) 'Vietnam' in M.C. Waters and R. Ueda (eds.) The New Americans:
A Guide to Immigration Since 1965, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
pp.652- 73.

Skeldon, R. (1994) 'Hong Kong's response to the Indochinese influx, 1975-93', The
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 534.

Tran, D.T. (1990) Writers and Artists in Vietnamese Gulags, with Choe's Cartoons from
Vietnam, Idaho: Century Publishing House.

Trieu, M.M. (2008) 'Ethnic chameleons and the contexts of identity: A comparative
look at the dynamics of intra-national ethnic identity construction for 1.5 and second generation Chinese-Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans,' PhD thesis, University of California, Irvine.

--(2009) Identity Formation among Chinese- Vietnamese Americans: Being, Becoming,
and Belonging, EI Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing.

U.S. General Accounting Office (1996) Vietnamese Asylum Seekers: Refugee Screening
Procedures under the Comprehensive Plan of Action, Washington, DC: The General
Accounting Office.

'Visions from Prison' (1995) in N. Morris and OJ Rothman (eds.), The Oxford History
of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society, New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 8 pages of unnumbered plates between pages 274 and 275.

Zinoman, P. (2001) 'Reading revolutionary prison memoirs', in H.T.H Tai (ed.), The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 21-45.