by Kate Weissenberger, Staff Writer
On November 5, I walked into a room whose title I did not yet know to view works I could not name created by a man I never had the privilege of meeting.
I don’t know what I expected to find in the Allen, but somehow the presence of a class hadn’t crossed my mind. My friend Elsa and I began our visit by awkwardly skirting around the edges of this horde of fidgeting first-years right at the tail end of their lecture. Almost immediately upon our intrusion, Elsa whispered to me that the professor leading the class had taught her first-year seminar. After a request for a minute of silence and a redistribution of students, the two exchanged a warm greeting, and my heart quietly broke.
Any class—any soul in Oberlin, really—has good reason to visit the museum right now. Currently on display in the East Gallery, where the sun shines first every day, are selected works from photography professor Pipo Nguyen-duy. The exhibit, set up shortly after the deaths of Nguyen-duy and his wife, Trần Nam Phong, on October 28, is clearly temporary, and the promise of a long-standing tribute hangs in the air, but to read the room in its current state is still to watch a grand blossoming of Nguyen-duy’s soul.
First on the left is a table. A box of tissues stands half-hidden behind a sign; a tribute book sits open-faced next to two prints taken from Nguyen-duy’s series The Garden. The book and the photographs are both, in their own ways, richly overgrown: the pages are more black than white, and the prints, which describe the beginning of a cycle of unfettered growth and decay, constantly threaten to escape the confines of two-dimensionality. A couple of much-larger prints in the center of the room conclude the routine of the seasons, ending with the bare branches and wet grief of Ohio winter.
Watching the calendar year unfurl through Nguyen-duy’s work was nothing less than devastating. There are a couple of combination-photo-and-interview books scattered around the room, with pretty covers that don’t quite convey the gravity of their contents. “I don’t really have a strategy for teaching because I am a student myself,” said Nguyen-duy in one interview. “Teaching is really an extension of my studio.” Reading that, I couldn’t help but wonder about a man who must have lived by the tilt of the earth, awaiting the inpouring of students each fall and sending them off proudly as summer reared its head. So when I caught a glimpse of Elsa and her former professor reflected in the glare-ridden cover of the middle prints, I saw him in the professor and I saw him in Elsa and that was decidedly the end of arms-length observation.
For me, the most striking image was the black-and-white Mercury, which depicts Nguyen-duy, Hellenic and hunched, perched upon spring-raised shoes. He’s myth and marble and muscle all at once, ready to fly into some great unknown only he can see. There is no fear on his illuminated face. Mercury is followed by Icarus—both pieces are part of Nguyen-duy’s collection AsSimulation—which decidedly expresses the same dream of leaping forth.
I had the privilege of being alone in that great green room for a period, quietly paging through the books that document not only Nguyen-duy’s stunningly vivid photographs, but the many-threaded story of his life in Vietnam, his immigration to the United States, his eventual adoption of photography as his preferred medium of expression, his decades-long teaching career, and, perhaps most importantly, the sheer reverence he held for the world, despite the evils it had seen fit to offer him.
“For me, it's not about the bad, or the good, or the hopeful, but about the way that these abandoned gardens really are, the way that they change,” he said. “People still celebrate and they still mourn, and they still go to get their hair cut at the barber, even in the time of war. And that to me is what is really beautiful about people, about humanity. We do the things regardless of whether it's a peaceful time or war. Life goes on.”
I sat with Pipo Nguyen-duy’s work and words in silence until the demands upon my time became impossible to ignore. Though he is now gone, I do think he, through his art, is still present: poised and perpetual, a beautiful model of courage and creativity, forever teaching his students how to be.
