Sculpting Agent Orange's Legacy

In a glass-enclosed rotunda, six plaster-white figures are suspended in mid-air. They look like ghosts, or broken shards of ancient sculptures. But on closer inspection you notice the hands, feet, and torsos are twisted and disfigured. Keisha Luce is the sculptor, and the exhibit is called “Sum & Parts.” She points to one piece. It’s of a 28-year-old man named Phong Tran.

"He’s really in a beautiful position, where his arms are kind of reaching out," Luce says. "He has very beautiful hands. You know they’re strong, but very tiny. And it’s kind of juxtaposed with this protruding chest. Which I think when you look at it, you first don’t understand that it’s actually a real human body.”

Tran is just 72 centimeters, or less than two and a half feet, tall. She met him in Danang, in the central highlands of Vietnam, where he teaches electronics and fixes motorbikes. She visited the garage where he lives and works. It contained only a tiny bed, a gold cross, a table, and a comb.

"I asked him at the end, would you be interested in being molded and casted for this series that I’m creating," Luce said. "He said, 'absolutely.' He said, 'I want to be seen in America, you know, to bring what’s happening in Vietnam to the American people.'"

She also interviewed Tran about how his deformities have affected him. Through a translator, Tran said he would like to have children. But he’d want to know that his disabilities won’t be passed along.

Agent Orange has been a part of Luce’s life from a very young age. Her father, Scott, had served as a soldier in Vietnam. She was just ten years old when he died in 1987, less than a year after he was diagnosed with skin cancer.

"That was the first time that there was talk about his cancer in relation to Agent Orange," Luce said. "I think it didn’t really occur to our family or to him that this was a result of the war. My father stepped on a landmine in Vietnam, and lost his leg, his right leg. His left leg was severely damaged and he lost many fingers, and he had a lot of shrapnel in his body as a result of the landmine. And I think that this was just one more blow that Vietnam was resurfacing again for him."

She says she’s not sure her father would have understood her project. He wouldn’t have been able to see outside his own grief, she says. But she’d read about Agent Orange, she’d seen the photographs, and she knew about humanitarian efforts to help those who were suffering.

"So I really wanted to go and see that for myself and try to document that in a different way, and actually absorb and bring those Agent Orange bodies back," she said.

One of those humanitarian groups is the War Legacies Project, based in Vermont and run by Susan Hammond. She helped Luce find Vietnamese non-profits who could connect her with Agent Orange victims. But she was skeptical the project would succeed.

"You go in and photograph and it’s pretty quick," Hammond said. "I mean, you still have some problems with trying to get the family to relax and feel comfortable with this foreigner entering their lives. And what she was doing was so much more personal than that, that I wasn’t sure whether it was going to be possible."

The technique Luce uses is called life-molding, or body-casting. She takes a gooey blue liquid with the consistency of yogurt and applies it to the body. Within about seven minutes it hardens into a rubbery silicone material, which can later be cast into a sculpture.

"When it applies to the body it picks up every contour, every pore, every wrinkle," she said. "So essentially when it’s cast I have an exact replica of whatever it was applied to."

Not everyone agrees with how Luce is documenting her subject. Christina Schwenkel teaches anthropology at the University of California at Riverside. In May she organized a conference there on representing Agent Orange in art.

"I think it’s very noble to bring the issue of Agent Orange to the public, and constantly remind the public of the need for the U.S. to claim responsibility and accountability for the suffering that continues in Vietnam," Schwenkel said. "But there is in my view a kind of ethical dilemma here about representing people’s body parts, rather than representing a person. And showing a person as a whole human being, with social connections, and a name, for example."

Schwenkel says showing just parts of a person’s body is a form of objectification. But Luce disagrees.

"It’s a fragmented country and these are disenfranchised people and they are fragmented sculptures," Luce said. "But I think, looking at them, at least for me, I feel like you can envision the whole and somehow together they become a whole piece."

Schwenkel says Western artists tend to focus on images of suffering, of isolation, and of the grotesque. Vietnamese artists, meanwhile, are more likely to show families, smiling and caring for each other. And they tend to build long-lasting relationships with their subjects, and go back repeatedly to photograph or film them. Luce says she recognizes the difficulties she faces.

"I think that’s the danger in all documentary art, with photography or film. People become objects. There’s always that possibility that you can exploit someone. Or not tell the story, or tell the story that you want to tell. My kind of counter to that was, it’s very easy to take a photograph of someone without their consent, or without them being a participant in that. None of this work could have been made unless people were participating. It took hours. It was difficult," she said.

One boy she molded, a sixteen-year-old named Loc, was abandoned at the hospital by his parents. He has three fingers on each hand, which look a little like lobster claws. He calls them his “dinosaur hands.” Two other molds are of a father and daughter, both with similarly deformed feet. Luce says she wanted people to see the impact war can have on the body – just like it had on her father’s body.

"The United States used a chemical 40 years ago that has now shaped a second and third generation of Vietnamese people," she said. "We decided that we were going to alter a landscape, which we did, but little did we know we altered the human body."

"Sum & Parts" will be on display through October 20 at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. As for Luce, she’ll continue to document the physical impact of war on the body. She’s just received a grant to travel to refugee camps in Sierra Leone this winter and make life molds of amputee victims.

(Photos by Kirk Torregrossa)