Happy New Year, Vietnam: A Tet Gift

NEW YORK - Jan. 2, 2014 - PRLog -- For Release After January 3.

In this month of beginnings,  the Buddhist lunar year arrives on Thursday, January 30; Tet is what the Vietnamese call the holiday period.  If you're  in Viet Nam,  and proximate to any coastline (and it's difficult not to be near one)---sea, lake, river, stream---you'd see glowing good-luck red balloons float over the water as night began.

         But if you're far away, the best view you're likely to get is in an extraordinarily handsome volume of photographs by Canh Tang lifelong resident of the once royal province of Hue who---except for one brief trip to Cambodia---has never left Vietnam.  Born in 1959, he is old enough to remember both the war years and the time of national pride without hubris and great privation that lasted long afterward.

         For years, Canh Tang has registered the world around him with impressive and moving visual acuity although only in the last decade or so has he been able to earn part of his living with his images of his neighbors living and working and occasionally celebrating, much as they always have.  Now a beautifully-produced hardcover book, Timeless Vietnam (Red Rock Press, $29.95),  introduces his photos beyond Vietnam's borders.

         His images dance as if they were in motion. A world of intention beats in fishing nets flung against the wind, a mallet about to strike wood, a lone cyclist balancing dozens of baskets. Wrestlers in a traditional Tet competition seem choreographed in an elaborate, almost delicate cartwheel.

         Some photos appear with snippets of classical poetry (in Vietnamese and in English translation) which seem to serve as captions although amazingly the words are hundreds of years older, reinforcing the changelessness and the repetition of both action and symbolic meaning buried in it what we witness.

         January, when the weather is relatively cool, brings tens of thousands of American and European (mainly French) visitors to Vietnam, and welcomes home for Tet  Vietnamese expatriates and their children born abroad. Many may glimpse some scenes similar to those Timeless Vietnam captures but it's unlikely that most travelers will have the opportunity or artistry to take similarly great photographs on their phones. Sadly, Vietnam does not offer collections of wondrous photographs for sale; and most western cultural collections seem still gripped in the horror of the war years.

         Timeless Vietnam, while emphasizing the fusion of past with present, moves the viewer on and in so doing so has united in America those who once might have agreed on nothing about Vietnam.  Jan S. Scruggs, founder of the D.C. memorial to U.S. soldiers and sailors who died in Vietnam, declares.  "this collection will amaze and excite you" while the fervent antiwar leader, folksinger Peter Yarrow, describes it as "an astonishingly beautiful exposition of the way of life of the people of  Vietnam."

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         Please contact Red Rock Press for high-rez versions of the photos in this message or a PDF of the book.