A RT
The peace plane Connla Stokes
Nguyen Manh Hung
A
bout fifteen years ago or more, I met an American artist called Bradford Edwards in Hanoi. Never seen in public without his trademark floppy hat, and always dressed for mild Californian weather, the lightly bearded and bespectacled Bradford had an air of youthfulness about him. You wouldn’t have guessed that he was in his fifties. As Bradford often created art from quirky objects and evocative images that he found, Hanoi must have been like a giant treasure trove for him, though I recall that his spells in the city were seasonal. Like me, the footloose Bradford loathed the long, hot and relentlessly humid summers, but, unlike me, he also had digs in Phnom Penh and Santa Barbara. While flitting in and out of Vietnam over the years, Bradford famously amassed a collection of 282 Zippos, all featuring the personalised engravings of US soldiers, sailors and airmen deployed in the war (yes, that war). His favourite read: ‘You can surf later’. In a New York Times story about his Zippo collection, which he exhibited and later sold, Bradford explained that Vietnam had been in his life from day one. His dad had been a fighter pilot and done two tours. During one of his many stints in the Vietnamese capital, it was inevitable—the Hanoi art scene being so small—that Bradford would meet Nguyen Manh Hung, a local contemporary artist, whose dad had been a fighter pilot in the war too. Contemplating this coincidence, and picturing their dads, as enemies, crisscrossing the same skies over the same rice fields—Bradford’s old man flew a Phantom F-4, Hung’s a Soviet-made MiG-21—the two artists knew they had to do something to acknowledge this next-generation moment. But what? If it’s true that most artists just need a deadline, it was serendipitous that Hanoi would be hosting the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November 2006. A congress of world leaders, including George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, would soon be coming to town and, as some
28
of you may recall, slipping into something much more comfortable (a splendid silk ao dai). Realising that, for a day or two, they might catch the global media’s attention, Bradford got in touch with Hung. He had an idea, a pretty brilliant idea. They met at a street-side cafe and, over iced coffees, the pilots’ sons drafted the blueprint of a life-size jet, an amalgam of their fathers’ respective planes, made out of bamboo, white rice paper and rope. Besides dealing with the trauma that they’d inherited from their fathers through their collaboration, the artists’ mutual message was simple. ‘A jet is a destructive instrument,’ said Bradford at the time, ‘but by using simple materials, we’re creating something soft and harmless and beautiful.’ In other words, their jet, dubbed the Peace Plane, would be a lover, not a fighter. Yet, when dreaming up this creation, and inspired by the Vietnamese tradition of burning votive offerings, the artists also decided they wanted to burn the jet to the ground. Not to send it to the afterlife but, in Hung’s words, to ‘exorcise this instrument of destruction from our lives’. In Hanoi, at that time, there was only one possible venue for such an event: the gardens of Dao Anh Khanh, a former police censor turned performance artist, who lived in a stilt house in Gia Lam district on the other side of the Red River. Anh Khanh’s own shows were a fixture in those days, always revealing his own obsession with pyromania (and primal screams), which must have influenced Bradford and Hung’s vision of a fiery climax. But, whoever looks into such things obviously figured the artists’ plan was a little too … incendiary? Or perhaps the neighbours just had (legitimate) concerns about an enormous bamboo and paper plane going up in flames in Anh Khanh’s woodsy front yard. It was only after completing their jet that Bradford and Hung were told they wouldn’t be allowed to set it on fire. The show still went ahead, but it felt more like a vigil with the lighting of candles around the jet rather than the euphoric blaze and cathartic finale the artists had envisaged. But when illuminated, and set against the darkness of an undeveloped skyline, the Peace Plane
still looked magnificent and, in my mind, the most symbolic aspect of the project—the two pilots’ sons conceiving and crafting the jet together to share a message of peace—had been accomplished. In the following days, APEC would wrap up and the world moved on. When I next bumped into Bradford at Highway4, a mutual hangout spot in Hanoi’s old quarter, I congratulated him on the collaboration with Hung, but he seemed crestfallen. He’d wanted to be exorcised, but, instead, he’d been left hanging. There was also the small matter of what to do with a life-size bamboo and paper jet. ‘Maybe I’ll put it up on eBay,’ Bradford said with a shrug.
S
ince moving to Ho Chi Minh City eight years ago, I hadn’t run into Bradford anywhere, but I recently found myself thinking of the Peace Plane when watching Hong Khaou’s Monsoon. The main character, Kit, is a former refugee, returning to Vietnam for the first time as an adult. Soon after arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, he begins a romance with an American expat called Lewis, whose dad served in the US-Vietnam War and, much more recently, committed suicide after years of suffering. Like Bradford, Vietnam has been in Lewis’s life since day one, and he too has travelled there, hoping to be set free. After the film ended, I went online, wondering where Bradford might be found these days, and wanting to ask him what had happened to the Peace Plane, only to sadly discover that he had died of a heart attack last November. At the time of his death, he was in Phnom Penh, where I believe he had been spending more time in recent years. The next day, I tracked down Hung to express my condolences. He told me that some Buddhist monks had arranged Bradford’s funeral in Cambodia. As for the Peace Plane, Hung said nature had simply taken its course. ☐ Connla Stokes is a writer based in Ho Chi Minh City
Interview Kishore Mahbubani
ASIAN LITERATURE
Thailand in turmoil Chris Baker Crackdown in Hong Kong Antony Dapiran Lawrence Osborne Paul French
32 9 772016 012803
NOVEMBER 2020 – JANUARY 2021
Inventing China Yuan Zhu Losing Hindustan Sudhir Vadaketh Sexism in Malaysia Dania Kamal Aryf