Pale morning light streams through the four tall windows that dominate the eastern wall of
Father Martin Lam Nguyen's room in the Holy Cross Annex, a 50-year-old prefab building
tucked in the woods along the road to Saint Mary's. "This," the associate professor of art
announces with a grin, "is a historic place."
Indeed it is. Built originally to house classrooms and a gymnasium for high-school-age
"minor" seminarians, the building now is an annex in name only. Holy Cross Hall, to which it
once was appended, is long gone, a victim of the wrecking ball in 1990. Over the years, the gray
metal structure has served a variety of congregational and University purposes, most recently
sheltering the studios of Nguyen '88M.Div. and his fellow Holy Cross priest-artists, the painter
James Flanigan '58, '63M.A., and sculptor Austin Collins '77.
As significant as all that may be, none of it represents the historical footnote Nguyen uses
to impress visitors: "You," he intones with mock reverence, "are in the head coach office of the
movie Rudy. All this paneling was added for the film [about the ND football walk-on]. There
was a partition over there," he gestures, "but I took it down."
Soon after joining the Notre Dame faculty 12 years ago, the Vietnamese priest
transformed the one-time movie set into his studio. From this cluttered space he has since created
thought-provoking art intimately shaped by his own history.
Typically that art consists of assembled fragments which add up to more than the sum of
their parts. "Most often my projects are very big -- both materially and in concept -- and take
four or five years to finish," he says. Nguyen's most recent piece, Face to Face, consists of 365
meticulously detailed pencil-drawn portraits of a little girl, each recording a day in her life over a
year. The title refers to Exodus 33 in which God speaks to Moses "face to face" as a friend. An
earlier work, Prayer of Sorrow, is made up of 36 identical 10-by-16-foot paintings of purple
irises, a memorial to the victims of the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War.
Why the fragmented approach?
"I think it is close to life experience," the 49-year-old Holy Cross priest says. "Life, you
know, is rarely something big and traumatic. It's just like pieces together. You get up, you have
coffee, you do laundry, you go to work -- and that's life. It's small things, small efforts by many
people over many days. At least that's how I see it."
Escaping Vietnam
Nguyen's own life, however, has been shaped by some large, traumatic events that have,
in turn, shaped his art. He walks across the room to a file cabinet and plucks out an album and a
stack of papers, each emblazoned with what appears to be a black ink blot. The images actually
are faithfully rendered silhouettes of the estimated 3,000 tiny mountain islands in Ha Long Bay
off of northeast Vietnam. The accompanying album contains 3,000 brief entries composed of a
phrase such as "The Blood." Each entry is linked by a number to one of the "ink blot" mountain
images. Together the images and memory album comprise a work called Mountain Waits that
represents Nguyen's life from his earliest memories as a child to the point when he created the
artwork.
Of all the memories, perhaps the one that shaped his life the most was when, in 1979 at
the age of 20, Nguyen and his father fled Communist Vietnam in a daring escape by boat. After
spending time in refugee camps they eventually made their way to the United States, where they
reunited with his mother and other siblings who had fled earlier.
"It was our third attempt and very dangerous," Nguyen says. "I calculated it would take
eight hours to reach international waters and be safe. We left in the middle of the night. At
daybreak the last thing I see [of Vietnam] was those mountains, the islands."
That experience became the basis for Mountain Waits. Creating the piece was such an
emotionally wrenching experience that it placed the Vietnamese priest in a period of deep
depression, causing him to seek treatment.
"It brought back very sharp memories. I can even smell the rice in the refugee camp in
Hong Kong," he says. "It was hard. Sometimes I felt resistance within me to write the memory
down. Remembering something is one thing, you know, but when you write it down, it's an act
of acknowledgment, of acceptance."
Nguyen hopes the art project is a healing catalyst for others as well. While he had a
specific personal memory in mind when he wrote "The Blood" and similar cryptic descriptive
phrases, he notes the words may trigger a powerful memory for someone else. "When you take
the risk of being so personal, you allow others who view the art to do likewise."
Ultimately all his art is driven by faith, Nguyen says. "I cannot separate my work from
my life as a priest. All that I do, I try to relate to that mystery that is God. I try to find ways to
portray that longing that we have, that reality.
"The idea [I try to convey] is that we need to recognize that God is always there.
Especially when we fail to recognize him. Then we have to work harder to recognize that.
Especially in failure, sin, shame, suffering -- all of that," he says. "The bright moments in life
are easy."
John Monczunsk is an associate editor of this magazine. Email him at monczunski.1@nd.edu.
Photo of Martin Nguyen by Matt Cashore '94.
(April 2008)
