» Mobile Military Medical Clinic 9/1970

The military medics stand thigh-deep in water. Their modest clinic is sequestered in the middle of a wooded marsh, embraced by leafstalks, vines and mosquito nets dangling from tree branches. A masked nurse lifts the net to let the stretcher-bearers in. The motionless youth lying on the stretcher with a capeline bandage is Danh Sơn Huol, a Khmer cadre wounded in an American bombing. He squints as if sleeping, sinking into a silence, slowly absorbing the shock of his injury. The impending operation is exposed to a variety of risks, ranging from changeful weather and drug shortages to hungry leeches and all the mythical creatures of the U Minh forest lurking in the deep. The precarity and poverty of the situation easily turns into a purely aesthetic experience for viewers far from the war, geographically and temporally, who could merely marvel with winged words at the guerrilla clinic’s theatrical allure. The mesmeric image softly vibrates as the bright ripples in the water summon the undulations of snakes slithering around the legs of the medics. The dramaturgical halo of the scene belongs to an enchanting yet sober and windless sort of drama. The operation doesn’t take place inside a building like that “large old church at the crossing roads, now an impromptu hospital” in a poem by Walt Whitman. Whitman’s spectacular and disorienting portrayal of the American Civil War is packed with hasty motion, “surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood.” Vo An Khanh’s visual poem illuminates a different style of improvised hospital, smaller, quieter, less grisly, more subdued. The medics manage crises with stoic composure, their upright bodies conjuring the noble presence of inert saints. The photograph is bound by a spell of unsettling calm as the slumberous wounded soldier is brought closer to the solemn medics, and the forest turns into a bewildering crossroads of emergency, where death and life quietly converge. 

The work is on permanent display at the Khai Sang headquarters, Paragon, HCMC, Vietnam.

(Edited from text excerpts provided by San Art)