Entitled “Yelling Clinic” (web site here), the exhibit curated by Katherine Sherwood features three artists Chau Huynh, Sunaura Taylor and Ehren Tool.

It’s running from yesterday September 13 through October 3.

Chau Huynh seems to be the star attraction though. She’s featured at the center of an educational tea by the gallery on September 21, 3-5pm, together with Nam Tran Nguyen and Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde – a UC Davis professor.

In her bio, Chau Huynh calls her training in Vietnam at the University of Fine Arts that of a “Communist propaganda artist” and states that her artistic restrictions were only removed when she came to the U.S. at the age of 27.

For this show, she is exhibiting the drawing Soul Catcher from her series An Nguyen’s Story, inspired from interviews with a boat-people refugee.

The Compound Gallery (web site here), is located at:

The Compound Gallery & Studios
6602/6604 San Pablo Ave
Oakland, CA 94608

By the way, if you’re wondering — Chau Huynh has graduated from the MFA program at UC Davis and is now, among other things, teaching at Sierra Community College, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, just a half-hour from the State Capitol.

Maybe someone should go protest her Art 4A class.

The Bolsavik had been at the reporter’s work station just a minute earlier. It was in a large undivided room with something like 20 desks. Not to mention other rooms “in the office.” Twenty journalists couldn’t figure out how the picture was offensive?

Then the Bolsavik found this on ScripturePics.org, a blog/website offering a devotional picture a week.

This picture puts the face of Jesus Christ in a foot bath, even with a bare foot next to it. And the fact is nobody finds it offensive, nobody is protesting it — because everybody apparently just knows this artist’s intention. While others would just refuse to accept artist Chau Thuy Huynh’s stated intention and would just insist on accusing her of insulting the flag.

That suggests there’s something that causes certain people (say, Christians of every ethnicity) to view art in their context. And then there’s something that causes some Vietnamese (not all, but also not just Vietnamese-Americans – the Bolsavik has received similar reactions from Vietnamese-French and Vietnamese-Australians) to automatically and irreversibly equate a foot bath with an intent to insult, regardless of context or backstory.

What’s that ”something”? Apparently it’s not genetic. So can it be cultural?

Food for thought.

Happy Passover. Hag kasher vesame`ah.

Q: After the protests erupted and you were fired, did you regret your decision?

A: No, I’ve never regretted it. However, in hindsight I think I should’ve run it with an editor’s note, explaining the context of it all. But otherwise, I would do it all over again.

The interview is online now and apparently will be in print tomorrow Saturday.

If you’re new to this blog, you can click on the tag “Nguoi Viet” to the right (like this) and get all prior entires on this subject.

A copy of the photo in question is shown below. The photo accompanies artist Chau Huynh‘s article, in which she related that her late mother-in-law, a refugee from South Vietnam, worked as a nail salon worker, not as a pedicurist but only as a worker who prepared people’s feet in that spa. Still, with what little money she made, she raised a family, sent her son to college, even paid for her daughter-in-law’s (the artist) college education.

The yellow-and-red-stripes color on the spa is the color of the flag of South Vietnam. The red power plug cover, to the Bolsavik, represents the communism from which the refugees escaped, but it has been interpreted to mean that communists have the power. Or something like that.

Read more about artist Chau Thuy Huynh here.

The artist at the center of an ongoing protest against Nguoi Viet Daily News, Chau Huynh, recently was named a “2008 ArtSeen Emerging Artist” by L.A. ArtSeen.

Read the announcement here. Click on number 19 to see a sample artwork by Chau Huynh.

Chau Huynh’s artwork published on Nguoi Viet’s special Tet issue became the target of a group of protesters who claim the work demeans South Vietnam’s flag.

The protests are still ongoing, with about a half-dozen people camping out in front of Nguoi Viet’s offices continuously.

Google Chau Huynh’s name in Vietnamese (Hu?nh Th?y Châu) and you get hundreds of hits at Vietnamese web sites and blogs. Like this. You would wish your name would bring up that many hits!

Chau Huynh was a Robert & Colleen Haas Scholar when she was at UC Berkeley, and she’s now a graduate student in the MFA program at UC Davis.

For a background on the protests, read story by My-Thuan Tran on the L.A. Times here. The Bolsavik’s termination as Nguoi Viet’s managing editor is mentioned but not by name.

The OC Weekly also has a story by Nick Schou here. Over the phone, however, Schou didn’t realize that there’s supposed to be another quotation mark inside the Bolsavik’s quote, like so: “People came up to me. ‘My mom thought it was inappropriate’; ‘my dad thought it was inappropriate.’ It’s not an extreme position to think it was inappropriate.” Oh well, not his fault.

ArtSeen is an art exhibit and charity auction event to benefit AIDS research.

The jury for 2008 ArtSeen Emerging Artists reads like a Who’s Who of contemporary art curating:

Stephenie Dillon- Capital Group Companies, Curator

Howard Fox- Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

David Gere – UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures, Associate Professor AIDS/Arts Activism

Rebecca Morse- Museum of Contemporary Art, Assistant Curator

John Murdoch- The Huntington, The Kully Director of Art Collections

Glenn Phillips- The Getty Research Institute, Consulting Curator in Contemporary Programs and Research