Cover of Mekong Diaries by Sherry Buchanan and Nam Anandaroopa Nguyen. Photos coutersy of Kim Đồng Publishing House

HÀ NỘI — The Vietnamese version of Mekong Diaries - an artbook featuring never-before-published drawings, poems and letters by war artists - has been released by Kim Đồng Publishing House. 

The book was compiled by Sherry Buchanan and Nam Anandaroopa Nguyen, and translated into Vietnamese by Phan Thanh Hảo. 

Trained by professors from the Hà Nội Institute of Fine Arts, the contributors journeyed down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to ensure a pictorial history of the war, they recorded battles and events from Operation Junction City to Khe Sanh to the General Offensive and Uprising in the spring of 1968.

They also sketched as the spirit moved them, rendering breathtaking landscapes, hut and bunker interiors, activities at base camps, troops on the move, portraits for the families of fallen soldiers and the unimaginable devastation that the conflict left in its wake.

Their collective record, which Buchanan skillfully compiles, is an extraordinary historical and artistic document of people at war. 

Artists Huỳnh Phương Đông, Lê Lam, Nguyễn Văn Trừ, Nguyễn Thanh Châu and others were present as soldiers travelled to the battlefield in the South. Art classes were held amid fierce bombs and bullets, in the basements and in the barracks of the resistance war against the US.

They composed and recorded authentic images of the battlefield, the rear and the battlefield landscape in the South from Tây Ninh, Bến Tre to Cà Mau during the period 1964-1975.

Stories about the lives of soldiers and people, including children and mothers and natural landscapes, were recorded expressing love for the homeland, courage and desire for peace.

Mekong Diaries includes sketches, watercolors, poems and letters by Vietnamese war artists.

The book also introduces the works of poets Lê Anh Xuân and Nguyễn Duy. The poems are interspersed with moving memoirs, diaries and letters sent from the battlefield.

Buchanan discovered the collections in Việt Nam when she was a journalist in Hong Kong in the 1990s. To preserve a historical record in danger of disappearing, she created a photographic archive with the Hồ Chí Minh City Fine Arts Museum and started a publication programme. 

Together with Nguyen, a Vietnamese - American art researcher, Buchanan travelled throughout Việt Nam for nearly two decades from 1998 - 2015, interviewing dozens of war artists, collecting sketches, watercolours and unpublished documents.

She is an advisor to the British Museum on Vietnamese art and has worked as a guest curator for the British Museum and Asia House in London, and for the Việt Nam National Fine Arts Museum in Hà Nội.

She is the author of several books such as Vietnam Posters: The David Heather Collection (2009) and Tran Trung Tin: Paintings and Poems from Vietnam (2002). — VNS