Vietnamese Artists, US Arts Benefactors & Fraud Artists

Group of 12 explore Big Apple

Hoping to bring ideas back home


by CHRISTOPHER REARDON, Special to the Toronto Star, Jan5/03



NEW YORK-It was well past midnight, and Dao Anh Khanh, still jet-lagged from
the trip from Vietnam, stood shivering at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge
in Chinatown



Sean Meehan, a percussionist he had just met at an improvisation festival,
felt the urge for an outdoor jam session. As his new friend coaxed textured
rhythms from a snare drum, Dao shed his coat and sang, first in low,
guttural moans, then howling with the wind.



"It felt dangerous at first," he recalled a few days later. "Then I listened
and thought, this is beautiful. We went for an hour non-stop drumming and
singing until 2:30 in the morning, with only ourselves for an audience."



Dao. a 43-year-old painter and performance artist from Hanoi was one of 12
Vietnamese artists who came to New York last month on a kind of
fact-