Look – what is that?! Is it a box, or merely the remnant of a gift that missed its journey? Lying silently at the center of the square canvas like a mark of fate, it’s bound with a rough twine, tied into a small bow as if someone had once lovingly, meticulously wrapped it with a kind of affection too elusive to name. And yet, the outer wrapping bears no color of festivity. It is a mossy gray shell, dense like jungle fog, like the dust that gathers atop a war memory chest.
Vietnamese lacquer, by tradition, celebrates permanence. People want lacquer to be glossy! But here, the artist uses it as a veil – a damp, shadowy layer of time. Look closer. What is that? A jagged black streak runs across the surface – like the track of a tire slicing through a slippery forest road. The scent of earth, of rotting leaves, the pounding of rain suddenly returns. The air feels suffocating.
That black trace cuts through a star that does not shine. The star silently draws in all light, like a bottomless black hole. And in that heavy stillness, a fragment of the American flag appears. Torn. Stripped of pride. The flag… ripped. As if a dream had never been whole. An American Dream tangled in contradiction, wrapped in the packaging of war, then abandoned somewhere deep in the Indochinese jungle.
Perhaps it’s a relic of a soldier. Perhaps a keepsake that was never handed over. Or maybe, like a ghost, it is a message from a war no one truly won. Was this gift sent, or is it waiting to be opened? Who was the sender? And who will be the one to unwrap it?
In the meditative layers of lacquer, the painting seems to whisper. About marches through rain, about dreams blurred by gunfire and inner noise. And at the center of it all is a question that spins endlessly in the viewer’s mind:
Where will the gift go?
Perhaps nowhere. It remains still, silent, like an unmarked grave in the forest. A gift unoffered, unreceived. Only the trace of an intention remains. A present sent from the far side of life, from beyond belief – like ashes wrapped in golden silk and forgotten at the crossroads of time.
But perhaps it waits for someone brave enough to open it. Not to receive a gift – but to face history, to confront collective wounds and unresolved memory. It is a journey in reverse, back into the past, where phantoms do not die but sleep within the roots and moist soil.
The American Dream! Once marketed as a luxury item – freedom, prosperity, opportunity. It shimmered like a Christmas gift in a shop window. But when the dream is boxed with war, with gunpowder and blood, it ceases to be a dream. It becomes a sorrowful lullaby in the hearts of survivors, an echo from those who never returned.
Silently, it knows. It is the portrait of an era, a relic of the truth masked in velvet and flags. And the American Dream does not soar in the sky, but lies buried deep underground, where tree roots cradle human bones.
Written by an anonymous Vietnamese lacquer art fan, the reflection above offers a personal perspective on “The American Dream,” a lacquer work by Bui Huu Hung.
Bui Huu Hung Foundation is honored to share it with our readers.
