huan Vu was barely a toddler when his family and thousands of others fled Saigon in the iconic closing days of the Vietnam War.

Vu, assistant art professor at Southern, was just two-years old in 1975, too young to absorb any details of the experience or any memory of the life his family left behind.

But Vu does remember his family’s stories about Vietnam where his father was a military officer and his brother spent eight years in a concentration camp. And he is old enough to recall how those stories affected him as the youngest in a family of refugees starting a new life in New Orleans.

Vu works with a student.

He remembers, for example, sending the clothes he outgrew to needy relatives in Vietnam and working after school in the restaurant his parents opened about 15 years after arriving in the United States. He also remembers growing up in the shadow of older siblings who became doctors, lawyers, and engineers.

“I grew up knowing how fortunate I was,” says Vu, one of eight children raised in a devout Catholic family. “The values instilled in me were to work hard and succeed because we had been given so many opportunities.”

As an artist whose works focus on issues of identity, Vu draws heavily on his family’s stories, his memories, and his values to shed light on the refugee experience. His resulting paintings are introspective self-portraits — moments suspended in shades of cool, silver-gray.

In recent years, Vu has answered a growing desire to learn more about his Vietnamese culture and history firsthand. Supported by several Connecticut State University grants for research and minority recruitment and retention, Vu has traveled to Vietnam twice and will return in December 2004.

Vu completed the first of these trips in the summer of 2002, accompanied by the English Department’s Ilene Crawford who was supported by her own CSU research grant to study literacy and women’s professional advancement in Vietnam.

The trip was pivotal. “Until I went to Vietnam, I was creating Vietnamese-American images without seeing Vietnam myself,” he says.

"Removal," oil on panel, from Vu's exhibit, "The Refugee Returns."  Since returning from his second trip to Vietnam, Vu has curated a show at Louisiana State University's Foster Gallery in Baton Rouge and mounted a solo show, "Neither Here Nor There," at the State University of New York College at Cortland.

During the two-week stay, Vu visited relatives in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. His first impressions included the sights and smells of the city, smog, and signs of pervasive poverty. Vu took photographs, documenting details he continues to incorporate into his art.

“It was shocking to see the level of work, the standard of living, and how much space we have in America compared with Vietnam,” Vu says.

In December 2003, Vu returned to Vietnam where he experienced a new feeling of comfort and familiarity. “There wasn’t this sense of holding your breath to see what would happen next,” he says. Vu studied Vietnamese charcoal-powder drawing, exploring everything from technique to the special materials needed. The photo-realistic technique has historical meaning within the Vietnamese culture; prior to the invention of the color copier, commissioned artists would use the technique to “enlarge” small snapshots for grave headstones and family altars.

The artist plans to return to Vietnam in December 2004 to study silk painting, another traditional Asian art form. “My training reflects the classical Western canon of knowledge,” says Vu, who attended Centre College in Kentucky and also studied in France, London, and at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. “I wanted to learn a technique that was important to Vietnamese artists and part of Vietnamese culture. Of course, all of this is synthesized through my work because I am Asian American.”

Memories heightened by photographs taken in Vietnam shape future work. Pictured are mobile fruit sellers in Ho Chi Minh City. "I brought back sincerity and alot more hands-on experience, empathy, and understanding about what I am painting," says Vu.

This basic fact of identity was not lost on the many people Vu met while in Vietnam. While they were charmed to discover that he is fluent in Vietnamese language and culture, locals identified him as a Westerner. Many noted that his complexion appeared darker than theirs. “The Vietnamese people I met didn’t think I looked Vietnamese,” says Vu.

The experience offered him a new perspective. “In the U.S., I’m viewed as an Asian man. In Vietnam, I was looked at as a visitor, an outsider. I looked too Western.”

Not surprisingly, questions of identity will continue to influence Vu’s work. “The artist must create a work that represents who he or she is,” says Vu, “and hope that the audience connects. You need to find that ideal visual format…the language to create something honest.” Vu credits his experiences in Vietnam with helping him to achieve this goal — bringing a heightened sense of reality to the homeland he once knew primarily through family stories.