SPECIAL ISSUE
THE CREATORS OF SOUTH VIETNAM:
AT HOME AND ABROAD

NGÔ THẾ VINH, Author / ERIC HENRY, Translator

ENTERING (AND DEPARTING) THE REALM OF CREATED IMAGES
Đinh Cường, the Awakened

ABSTRACT

Đinh Cường (1939–2016) was a visual artist who also published two poetry collections and a two-volume work on painting. The latter discusses the history of the Fine Arts Academy of Vietnam, established by the French in 1930, and examines the work of sixteen artists. The present article, though focused primarily on Đinh Cường, takes note also of the work of two other artists, Mai Thứ and Tạ Tỵ, and of the formation and activities of The Association of Young Vietnamese Artists. It also includes a poem and an article written in French by Đinh Cường’s contemporary, Bùi Giáng. It provides an account of the stages of Đinh Cường’s artistic production, and concludes with an account of his final illness. — Eric Henry.

KEYWORDS
Vietnamese fine arts, the Association of Young Vietnamese Artists; Mai Thứ, Tạ Tỵ, prostate cancer

Figure 1. Đinh Cường in Saigon. (Photo by Phan Bá Đương, Saigon, 1978).

Figure 2. The front covers of Đinh Cường’s two poetry collections: Raking Leaves Outside by Night (left), and I Come Back and Stand Bewildered (right), Burk, Virginia period.

Figure 3. Left: Đinh Cường and Võ Phiến. Right: Đinh Cường and Đoàn Quốc Sỹ. (Đinh Cường, personal archives).

Entering the Realm of Created Images (Đi vào cõi tạo hình)

This work by Đinh Cường is in two volumes. Volume I deals with sixteen artists of repute. Following the order in which they are presented, these are: Lê Phổ, Lê Văn Đệ, Mai Thứ, Nguyễn Gia Trí, Tôn Thất Đào, Nguyễn Đỗ Cung, Diễm Phùng Thị, Trương Thị Thịnh, Tạ Tỵ, Văn Đen, Lê Văn Phương, Võ Đình, Bùi Xuân Phái, Thái Tuấn, Duy Thanh, and Ngọc Dũng. It does not have the character of a scholarly work, but consists instead of a series of occasional essays. Đinh Cường creates lively portraits of every artist that he had an opportunity to meet and interact with, to which he adds rich, and often very personal, materials that he perhaps kept in his possession. The paintings selected for inclusion in the book reflect the fine judgement of the author in choosing works that illustrate the personalities and abilities of each artist. The other volume deals with the Fine Arts Academy of Indochina, established by the French, dwelling on the period from the 1930s to the transitional year of 1954 when the Geneva Accords took force and divided the country.

For me [Ngô Thế Vinh] the book Entering the Realm of Created Images, vol 1, has personal associations; it carries me back, like a flashback, to such personalities of a former era as Tôn Thất Đào, Mai Thứ, and Tạ Tỵ. It makes me recall the years when I studied drawing under the artist Tôn Thất Đào when I was a middle-school student in Huế.

The Artist Mai Thứ

The name of the artist Mai Trung Thứ, especially, draws me [the author] into even more distant recollections. In the years before I came to exist—before the 1940s—my revered father was a French professor at the Khải Định High School during the same period in which Mai Trung Thứ was a professor of painting. The two gentlemen were acquainted with each other back then. In 1952, after my family returned from Thanh Hóa to live in Hanoi, Mai Thứ was living in France. He and my father kept in touch with each other. I was eleven at the time and knew of Mai Thứ’s appearance only through a few photographs that he sent as gifts. They are no longer in my possession, except for two that can still be seen in our family album that show him in his Paris studio.

Figure 4. Left: “A Mother Giving Sewing Lessons.” Right: “Calligraphy.” Images on UNICEF postcards to help support the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). (Source: Mai Lan Phương, daughter of Mai Thứ).

Figure 5. The artist Mai Thứ in his Paris studio in 1952.  (Ngô Thế Vinh, personal archives).

As Đinh Cường observed, “to see again the world of little children in the paintings of Mai Thứ is a joy, a source of happiness.” And this has been a joy, not just to those looking at his paintings; Mai Thứ has greatly increased the joy and happiness of countless unfortunate children on all five continents through his paintings of children that have appeared on UNICEF postcards of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, which supports its successor, the United Nations Children’s Fund.

The Artist Tạ Tỵ

Beginning in the pre-1975 era, I [Ngô Thế Vinh] had opportunities to look at Tạ Tỵ’s paintings, read his poetry, and even look at his books containing cultural observations, Ten Faces of People in the Arts (Mười Khuôn Mặt Văn Nghệ, Nam Chi Tùng Thư, Saigon, 1970), and Ten Faces of People in Today’s Art World (Mười Khuôn Mặt Văn Nghệ Hôm Nay, Lá Bối, Saigon, 1972), and I remember feeling that each author in these volumes was depicted in a sharply individualized manner. Tạ Tỵ was a graduate of the Indochinese Academy of Fine Arts (l’école des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine / Cao Đẳng Mỹ Thuật Đông Dương), but he didn’t confine himself to the procedures and styles in which he had been trained at that school: instead, he ceaselessly pursued what was new and, from very early in the 1950s, was regarded as an avant-garde artist exploring the realms of cubism and abstract art.

It was actually only after 1990 on American soil, when we both shared the unwelcome fate of exile that I made his acquaintance. Tạ Tỵ belonged to the same generation as Vũ Khắc Khoan, Mặc Đỗ, and Nghiêm Xuân Hồng; he was a generation older than me. He had read “A Small Dream for the Year 2000” (“Giấc Mộng Con năm 2000”), and with great warmth shared with me a plan of his for a cultural park abroad, that he wished to name “The Great Dream.” In a personal letter that he sent to me from Garden Grove on February 1, 1995, he wrote:

I share a great deal in the things you have written, though I have grown old in years, and the things I dream of will certainly be difficult to realize, but that scarcely matters, because it all belongs to the future, and that future, compared with the evolution of time as well as its past, isn’t worth anything. The flame has already been lit, and all we need is more fuel to make it burst into a longlasting conflagration in the soul of every loyal refugee, whether he be an intellectual or a man in the street. How I wish for it! I hope, and hope, and hope! I hope you never will allow people to say, ‘You gentlemen all arrived too late!’

Figure 6. Left: A painting by Tạ Tỵ, “Remembering Hanoi; Fragments of Life in Exile,” oil, 2000; right: Đinh Cường and Tạ Tỵ. (Đinh Cường, personal archives).

And, on a purely personal occasion, he confided to me that he was ready to contribute a number of his larger, more significant works to this Culture Park whenever it could be brought into being. But then, quite unexpectedly, he let me know in another personal letter written from San Diego on July 27, 2000, that he had decided to return to Vietnam to live: “though I can’t know in advance what will happen in my life, I nevertheless wish to seek repose in Vietnam, the place where I was born and lived for more than sixty years. After returning there, I will wash my hands forever of everything concerned with the brush, and wait for my entrance into the realm of nothingness. I miss you all very much.” – Tạ Tỵ.

Then, with no fanfare whatsoever, he returned to Saigon, and lived his final years in the company of his youngest daughter. He died on August 24, 2004 at the age of eighty-three. He fulfilled his wish to pass his days of retirement in his homeland. His body, after cremation, returned to dust, but his name and works live on in the stream of our people’s culture.

The Association of Young Vietnamese Artists

During the 1960s, a new generation of artists came to prominence, including such figures as Đinh Cường, Nguyễn Trung, Nghiêu Đề, Cù Nguyễn, Lâm Triết, Trịnh Cung, and Nguyên Khai. . .  they were not only young in years, but were all characterized by a desire to engage in a ceaseless search for ways to rejuvenate the art of Vietnam. The Association of Young Vietnamese Artists was formally established in 1966, with following statement of purpose: “We, a number of young artists, unafraid of any spiritual or material difficulties that we may face, are hereby establishing an organization to be called The Association Young Vietnamese Artists, and in doing so hope to create opportunities to meet and exchange experience, and based on these exchanges create new and original modes of expression in a pure and open atmosphere.”  

Figure 7. Left: A meeting on September 11, 1983 to celebrate the birthday of Thái Tuấn; back row, from left: Trần Lê Nguyễn, Đinh Cường, Thanh Tâm Tuyền; front row, from left: Thái Tuấn, Quang Dũng, Doãn Quốc Sỹ (Quang Dũng, author of the poem “Western Advance,” [“Tây Tiến”] was a childhood classmate of Thái Tuấn). Right, from left: Nguyễn Mộng Giác, Đinh Cường, Khánh Trường, and Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng. (Đinh Cường, personal archives).

But one does not have to wait until 1966, the year this group was established, to see remarkable developments in art. Throughout the twenty years from 1954 to 1975, painting and sculpture in the South underwent bold, enthusiastic, and robust development along with all the other branches of art in a fortunate historical confluence arising from the benign conditions that prevailed there. The artists involved were in their twenties and thirties, regardless of whether they were association members or not. Some, like Đinh Cường, Lâm Triết, Nguyễn Trung, Trịnh Cung, and Nguyễn Phước had graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts; some, like Nghiêu Đề had left before graduating, and some, like Cù Nguyễn didn’t come from an academy, but they were all like seams of jade in ore, people who had the opportunity to develop their talents to the utmost and create paintings of value in the free atmosphere of South Vietnam.

Through my old and close friend, Nghiêu Đề, the illustrator of my books, I [Ngô Thế Vinh] had the opportunity to establish acquaintance and interact with many of that era’s young artists, among whom were Lâm Triết, Cù Nguyễn, Nguyễn Trung, Nguyên Khai, Trịnh Cung, Đinh Cường, and then, after a few years, Nguyễn Lâm and Hồ Hữu Thủ.

Looking at Đinh Cường’s Paintings

In the course of observations on the art of painting, Đinh Cường once said, “I drew in all surroundings, in every location. I never knew why. Sometimes I was close to despair and every now and then I felt as though I had been rescued. And I would continue to draw, continue to meditate.”

Figure 8. Left: “Passing over the La Vang Sandy Hill” (Qua Đồi Cát La Vang), oil; collection of General Ngô Quang Trường. Right: “Garden of Boulders.” (“Vườn Đá Tảng”; oil; 1994).

Figure 9. Paintings of Đinh Cường from the pages of Free World
(Thế Giới Tự Do), XIV; 8, 1967, Saigon.

Đinh Cường became well-known before he graduated from the Fine Arts Academy, having won a silver medal in the Spring Exhibition of 1962 with the painting “Mythology” (Thần Thoại).

Beginning with his period of figurative painting, Đinh Cường attained fame at once for his paintings of a romantic period in which, with delicate lines, he showed a Đà Lạt with poetic, misty, mountain roads in deserted surroundings in which a lonely bird could be seen perched on the tip of a church’s bell tower.

When viewing the paintings Đinh Cường one cannot but be led by association to a memory of a church steeple in a black-and-white French film, Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray (Sundays in the Village of Avray), that everyone was familiar with back in 1962. It was about an aviator who, in the course of attacking a group of enemy vehicles, grows convinced that he has killed a young girl by mistake. His plane is shot down and, though he survives, he suffers a total loss of memory. Later he meets a ten-year-old orphan girl named Cybele who has been left in an orphanage to be cared for by nuns. He is sure that she is the girl who died in the bombing, and from that point on, an innocent and pure attachment forms between the aviator and the girl. But this beautiful, chaste attachment becomes an object of suspicion and then a scandal in the town of Avray, and the story ends in tragedy. Đinh Cường related that once, when he went to France, he paid a visit to Avray Village, and sought out the spire atop the bell tower that had appeared in the film, with a rooster perched on its tip.

After more than half a century of continuous creation, Đinh Cường has been the subject of many articles that attempt to assess and criticize his paintings. Almost all of these articles speak of their poetic or romantic quality.

Trịnh Công Sơn wrote: “In painting, Đinh Cường is the poet of nostalgia” (Tuổi Trẻ, September 1986).

Đặng Tiến, in a French-language article entitled, “Đinh Cường, La Source Résurgente/A Soul With No limits” (Tấm Lòng Vô Hạn), that served to introduce an exhibition of his works at the Galerie d’Annam 2010, wrote, “The paintings of Đinh Cường in their essence are perhaps the recollections of a rose whose color and fragrance have been offered up to the human world” (Orléans, October 2010).

Huỳnh Hữu Ủy had the following to say, “Đinh Cường established a universe suffused with poetry, a fusion of feeling with brushwork expressing a uniquely personal train of thought. In these works, the harmony of the colors and the design of the strokes are the means of expressing a mode of thought that includes many depths and reflects many images of our life and time.”

Figure 10. Đinh Cường and Bùi Giáng, Saigon, 1987. 

Bùi Giáng spoke of the poetic substance of of Đinh Cường’s paintings in a French-language poem that he presented to Đinh Cường in 1972:

Le Poème de la Peintur [The Poem on the Painting]
Il s’en va comme le Poison d’eau douce
Sa peinture rêveuse s’en va comme le Demeurer du Demeurant
Qui déploie son ordre et se refuse
Sur le mode de la Double Réserve.

[He comes along, a fish in gentle water
His dreamy painting like a remnant of a remnant
Imposing his own order, self-effacing
in a mode of double-layered reserve].

Je n’ai rien à lui dire sinon peut-être
Que le Poème de la Peinture
S’entend à merveille avec la Peinture du Poème
Comme la Reine des Almées
A’appelle aussi bien l’Almées des Reines
Que le Retour da la convalescente qui chante sa joie
A réjoui immensement l’Enfant des Riveraines
Au bord de l’Abîme des Abîmes.

[I’ve nothing to observe to him, except perhaps
That the poem on the painting
Sounds perfectly like a painting on a poem
Just as the queen of supplicants
Is called as well the alms-receiving queen,
That the return of the recovered one who sings his joy
Gives joy as well to the child of the river banks
Upon the edge of the abyss of the abysses].

Vous n’avez rien a dire sinon peut-être
Que l’Éclaircie de l’Être lui est favorable
Comme l’Éraflure du Temps lui est favorisante
Lorsque la Terre advient à l’émergence
Tandis qu’un Monde s’ouvre.

[You’ll have no words, except perhaps
To say the glory of existence favors him,
The glory of the times, too, favors him
When earth comes up to its emergence
And the world opens up].
 - Bùi Giáng, 1972.

In a personal setting, Đinh Cường once told me that he was most pleased by an article on his work by Đỗ Long Vân, a fine arts critic and a  friend who had shared a studio with him on Hoa Hồng (“Rose”) Street for two years in Đà Lạt. The article, in French, was later translated into Vietnamese in an inspired manner by Bửu Ý. The original and the translation are given below:

Nul éclat. Aucune dissonnance. Une pâte sombre et dense, légère malgré cela, et qui chante comme de l’or. C’est un or nocturne dont toute la lumière est tournée vers l’intérieur. Cela ennuie tout d’abord, et puis l’on finit par aimer cette pudeur obstinée, qui, pour sembler sans audace, n’en est pas moins durement conquise.  Il suffit d’ailleurs de regarder Cường au travail et l’on voit que le charme simple et lisse qui séduit lentement en ses toiles, jamais Cường ne l’a atteint du premier coup, mais qu’il est aboutissement de longs essais ou se conjuguent le hasard et l’on ne sait quelle fatalité. Ses toiles debutent toujours dans l’éclat. Cela commence comme une explosion de fleurs et, presque toujours, cela devient un océan et nuit bleue et noire, non la veille nuit sanglante qui obsède de la mémoire de son souvenir, mais la jeunesse du monde dont tous les trésors enfouis s’éveillent pour illumine de leur éclat fragile cette première nuit qui s’appellerait aussi bien l’aurore. Car voilà que du fond de la terre des lueurs nous viennent, que l’espace s’entr’ouvre dan un envol d’acier, que des cristaux scintillant tandis qu’au-dessus de l’abime, des villes en derive tentent d’aller ensemble. . .

[No splendor, no dissonance. An impasto dense and somber, but still light, calls out like gold. It is a gold ingot in the night that directs all its light inward. This at first is boring, but in the end makes the viewer grow fond of its obstinate reticence, which though devoid of audacity, is not for that reason less adamant in its conquest. As for how he achieves this, it is only necessary to look at him as he works, and one can see that the simple, smooth charm that slowly seduces the viewer of his canvases is never achieved all at once, but is always the outcome of a long process of exploration in which chance is conjoined with some unguessable kind of pre-determined necessity. His canvases always begin with a burst of light. It is like an explosion of flowers, and almost always this turns into an ocean, a blue and black night, not the ancient bloody night that haunts the memory, but the youth of the world, in which buried treasures wait to be illumined by the fragile beams that will be the dawn of this first day. For at the bottom of this land of lights, space enters into a flight of steel, which with crystalline gleams emerges from the abyss, encouraging villages to fly up together. . .].

After Đà Lạt, Đinh Cường lived for a long time in Huế. There he created paintings with the “sad and subdued colors” (the words of Huỳnh Hữu Ủy) of the Inner City, and of the ancient capital of Huế, at once majestic and shabby, half hidden beneath layers of moss.

Đinh Cường met with early success but he continued to seek new paths. There was a six-year period (1969–1975) in which he entered the realm of abstract painting.

Figure 11. Left: Đinh Cường’s studio on Rose Street in Đà Lạt, 1963; middle: Đỗ Long Vân and Đinh Cường, Đà Lạt, 1963. Right: “Đà Lạt Nostalgia,” oil, by Đinh Cường.
(Đinh Cường, personal archives).

Responding to an interviewer in Free World (Thế Giới Tự Do, XIV; 8; 1967, Saigon), Đinh Cường expressed himself as follows: “I gradually stripped away all thoughts of objects; or to use more philosophical language, I abandoned the forms of things so as to concentrate solely on the matter of the paint itself.” But in the end he returned to the creation of images in paintings so characteristic of him that they scarcely required a signature for the spectator to know who the artist was. In terms of quantity, he created perhaps close to a thousand paintings. He resettled in the United States in 1989, and by the year 2000, a space of ten years, he had five exhibitions, not counting various exhibitions that took place within Vietnam.

Figure 12. Left: Đinh Cường’s studio on Hòa Bình (“Peace”) Street, Huế, Inner City; right: “Huế Nostalgia,” oil by Đinh Cường.

According to Đỗ Hồng (the poet Đỗ Nghê) and Thân Trọng Minh (the writer and poet Lữ Kiếu), two of his colleagues, Đinh Cường, though aware by 2011 that he was ill, still went back to Vietnam that year for a joint exhibition with Thân Trọng Minh. By 2013, he had become feeble, but he still went back to Vietnam to meet friends and participate in a second exhibition. In 2015, he made preparations to return for another painting exhibition, an important one, in Dà Nẵng, at the Museum of Chàm Sculpture (Viện Bảo Tàng Điêu Khắc Chàm), but this had to be postponed because the artist had embarked on a course of chemotherapy.

Aside from his artistic paintings, most of which were oils, and which formed the major part of his output, mention must also be made of the many sketches he created of his colleagues in the arts, as well as some he made of himself. This also was an aspect of his genius.  

Figure 13. Sketches of artistic figures by Đinh Cường. Top, from left: Bùi Giáng, Tuệ Sỹ, and Nguyễn Đức Sơn. Bottom, from left: Doãn Quốc Sĩ, Võ Phiến, Thanh Tâm Tuyền, and Nguyễn Đình Toàn. (Viễn Phố, personal archives).

Đinh Cường had occasion at times to admire the power of persistence of Khánh Trường, especially after the latter fell prey to illnesses: two strokes, cancer of the vocal cords, an ulcer, and kidney failure, which compelled him to undergo peritoneal dialysis every night. In spite of all this Khánh Trường still created the work “Sun at Dusk” (“Tịch Dương”), accepted commissions to create book covers, made many paintings on Zen themes, and had three exhibitions of his work. Commenting on this, Đinh Cường wrote, “. . . a person whom I imagined had died, but who lived again, lived gloriously so as to Cross to the Shore, the Shore of tranquil existence (“Khánh Trường, the Power of Silence,” Virginia, January 8, 2012).

But then Đinh Cường himself had to endure many ups and downs in his health that at times subjected him to suffering, but his power to do work continued undisturbed through all the phases of his illness.

Reading Đinh Cường’s Poems [by Đinh Cường]
Sweeping Leaves in the Yard at Night
Dedicated to Bửu Ý

As dusk grows deep the twigs are bare 
I grope; all things are lost in mist
Amid a thousand layered shadows, I feel cold
The falling leaves rustle at year’s end,
Throughout the day I hear the sound of crows
Beside the moss-green porch they call,
At times pretending to sleep late.
My dreams are full of solitude.
Near dusk I go out to an unknown river pier,
And on the other side streetlights come on,
And only then I see that winter days  
Are calling to some nameless sun:
A friend of old who hails a friend
The wings of geese convey the call;
I stand alone, all cold,
And sweep the yard of leaves by night.
 - Virginia, November 1997.

Looking at Đinh Cường’s Newer Paintings

Figure 14. Composition in Gray I, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches, Đinh Cường 2014.

Figure 15. Composition in Gray II, Oil on canvas, 30 x 30 inches, Đinh Cường 2014.

The Friday Poems

Birth, old age, illness, and death are the four miseries of corporeal existence from which no living thing escapes. I myself, the writer of this book, have spent forty-six years practicing medicine and have myself been a seriously ill patient during the years following my release from prison, and it was only then that I fully grasped the meaning of the saying “there are no illnesses, only people who suffer from illnesses.” In a book entitled, When Doctors Are Patients, by M. Pinner M. and Miller B.F. (W.W. Norton, New York, 1952), a true record may be found of the experiences that doctors themselves must undergo when they face serious or untreatable illnesses. Pinner M., himself a doctor, reaches this conclusion: “An ill person doesn’t simply face an illness, but must deal with a total collapse.”

I had those endless thoughts after speaking with Đinh Cường on the telephone. The voice of my friend was warm and deep, just as it had always been. I was aware, though, of reports concerning his health after he had crossed the threshold into advanced old age—and an injury to his skull and a swift decline in strength after starting a round of chemo made his friends very anxious. Three years earlier, he was in a traffic accident which, though minor, caused a blood clot to form in his cranium. According to his colleague Nguyễn Tường Giang, an old friend who was very close to Đinh Cường, he returned to complete normalcy after a trepanation to remove the clot, retaining only a scar produced by the procedure.

But a bit more than four years ago, before I wrote this article, Đinh Cường was diagnosed with a different illness: prostate cancer. Prostate cancer, like breast cancer in women, is a fairly common disease. With the advances that have taken place in medicine, both types of cancer can, in many circumstances, be cured if they are detected early and treated appropriately. There is no lack of people who have had prostate cancer for more than thirty years and have remained healthy and strong into their nineties. If such people reach that age, they often die of other causes.

I’m not sure whether Đinh Cường’s illness was diagnosed early or not but, perhaps because he was more than seventy years old, his doctors chose chemotherapy rather than surgery as the best way to deal with his illness. His condition subsided for a while, but then the chemo had to be resumed, with all the side-effects that that entailed. He endured it all courageously.

He would sit in a special chair, excessively familiar to him, gazing at the drops of medication as they descended their plastic tubes, but that was just a physical detail; Đinh Cường would still make poems or small paintings, and then the next day his friends would come to take him to breakfast or brunch. Sometimes it would be Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng or Nguyễn Từng Giang, sometimes Phùng Nguyễn and Như Hạnh, sometimes Nguyễn Thế Toàn (known as Toàn Bò), sometimes Nguyẽn Minh Nữu, sometimes Phạm Cao Hoàng, and in addition to these, all his friends from distant places would come to visit him. Đinh Cường was very sociable, and would sally forth from his house almost every day, surrounded always by an affectionate group of friends.

Figure 16. Đinh Cường and Ngô Thế Vinh in the artist’s garage studio, Burke, Virginia, 1993. (Photo by Như Phong [Lê Văn Tiến]).

I would phone my friend from afar: 9:00 in the morning in California is the same as noon in the east, and I would be cheered by the voice of Đinh Cường, as deep and strong as ever, and then he would turn the phone over to someone else, sometimes to Phùng Nguyễn of The Tower of Memory (Tháp Ký Ức) at the site “Skin of Color,” at Starbucks, and sometimes to Nguyễn Tường Giang of Drifting Smoke Above the Lake (Khói Hồ Bay) from the Café Montmartre, or Le Chat Noir, and he would refer to his old friend Nguyễn Tường Vũ, and to Thế Uyên of Gray Attitude (Thái Độ Xám), and then to Duy Lam of My Family (Gia Đình Tôi) with a report of his declining health, and then the phone would be turned over to Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng of George Mason University, who had just returned from Beijing and Nanning, with impressions of the just established “think tanks” of China, the members of which were relatively young—around forty—not aged and decrepit like their counterparts in Vietnam—a Vietnam that was still conscientiously trying to follow the example of China but was almost always twenty years behind, leading one to think of something said by Lê Khả Phiếu, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, that had caused many Vietnamese to wrinkle their brows: “If the Chinese succeed in their renovation, then we too will succeed; if they fail in their renovation, then we too will fail” (Far Eastern Economic Review, June 22, 2000).

Though I was thousands of miles away from him, cellphones and email messages made me feel that we were as close as if we lived in the same small village.

Figure 17. “Autoportrait” by Đinh Cường; made in a Starbucks café, April 17, 2015.
(Hoàng Ngọc Biên, personal archives).

Poem by Đinh Cường Sent to Ngô Thế Vinh
Beside the chemo chair ịn yonder room,
The nylon tubes hang loosely down.
Two intravenous pouches filled with fluid clear as tears:
I raise my gaze, the drops fall one by one
The drops drip down, and I recall Văn Cao:
From heaven blue
There drop
Some Cham tower drops;
Quy Nhơn. The day you came there, the early months of 1985:
Three Quy Nhơn poems: Quy Nhơn I, Quy Nhơn II, Quy Nhân III
You wrote them down: three cello pieces, beautiful as ancient myths.  
The sea escorts some groups of swallows back,
The sun dries out the just-formed buds of coconuts,
. . . around Quy Nhơn,
I was like a child who dotes on myth.[1]
Drip, drip, drip: I raise my eyes again;
To see it drawing near the final drop,
Two hours, eyes half closed, two hours, drawing breath, chemo, chemo…
And then it seems I hear a lively dance tune, leaping Africans
And then I seem to hear the urgent words of Đỗ Hồng Ngọc:
You have to live—and live quite differently—live content—
Who can do another’s breathing? Who can do another’s trance?
 - Virginia, July 10, 2015.

A Đinh Cường Awakened

I recall now an interview of Đinh Cường conducted by Nguyễn Nam Anh (this was one of the pen names of Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng) almost a quarter of a century ago. On that occasion Đinh Cường said, “It is a fact that our life down here is in concrete terms cruel and bitter. The more cruel and bitter it is, the more calm and quiet I become. As a result of this, I have come to recognize a principle: Do everything you can for some good piece of work. This will at times bring you fulfillment. My paintings have kept me alive—I cannot abandon drawing (Tạp Chị Thế Kỷ 21, No. 23: March, 1991).

“The more cruel and bitter life becomes, the calmer and quieter I become.” Twenty-four years after talking with Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng, Đinh Cường in fact adhered strictly to this principle, even in the cruel and extreme circumstances to which his failing heath exposed him. Nguyễn-Xuân Hoàng himself had been dead for a year—his death had occurred on September 12, 2014. Đinh Cường was still breathing; he lived on, intact, second by second and day by day. He still painted and made poems. And in the year 2015 he completed two books of art criticism: Entering the Realm of Created Images, vol. I and II. As Đinh Cường said to himself: “I must live, and live quite differently; I must live content.” He was a Đinh Cường who had experienced an awakening, though perched unsteadily on the road to death.

On Friday, August 28, 2015, a chemo day for Đinh Cường, he was picked up at the hospital by Nguyễn Thế Toàn. I chatted with him on the phone as he went back—he was still Đinh Cường, with a warm and composed voice. He and his friend chatted as unconcernedly as if they were returning from a picnic. The next day, a Friday morning, Đinh Cường took Nguyễn Đình Thuần to Washington, D.C. to see the paintings in the National Gallery of Art, and then went with him to a gathering of friends that lasted till the small hours. Đinh Cường remained with them throughout, which was a joy to all his friends in distant places who wanted to hear about his health.

The Passing of Đinh Cường

Đinh Cường died on January 7, 2016 in Virginia, in the place where he had settled in 1990.

A collection of items by and about Đinh Cường, consisting of more than 700 pages, was completed by his friends and published in Huế on January 7, 2017, his first death anniversary: Leaving Reveals One’s Depth of Feeling (Ra Đi Mới Biết Lòng Vô Hạn). It was in four sections: “Traces Left By Đinh Cường,” “Đinh Cường Viewed From Many Viewpoints,” “The Creative World of Đinh Cường,” and “Materials and Images,” the last section including rare and precious items kept by his family and friends.

And so, we bid a last farewell to Đinh Cường. Two lines of verse that he himself wrote will serve to evoke his endlessly creative life:

To leave reveals one’s feelings’ depths;
Mist deepens on the River Hương.

END NOTES

[1] Văn Cao – Lá – Thơ (“Văn Cao — Leaves — Poems”) published by Tác Phẩm Mới, 1988.