KEY POINTS:
Nguyen Lieu's brightly coloured canvases warn his country that its coastal environment is in peril.
"Nha Trang is the most beautiful bay, recognised worldwide but exploitation there is chaotic," Lieu, 53, said at Galerie DEWI, where 15 of his oil paintings are exhibited.
His home town on Vietnam's
south-central coast has smooth sandy beaches, islands and mountains, but it also reflects the ugly side of rapid development and tourism.
It is a story being repeated up and down the impoverished country's 3200km-long coastline.
Oil slicks, dead rivers and polluted air are part of an often-bleak environmental picture as Vietnam's 85 million people head toward industrialisation. Lieu's art is unusual in communist Vietnam in displaying a consciousness about a contemporary global issue. It shows a dire need to preserve and protect coral reefs and marine life for future generations.
For good reason, environmentalists say. Vietnam is a "biodiversity hotspot". Less than 25 per cent of coral reefs surveyed have living coral and 75 per cent are at high or very high risk, eight times the average for Southeast Asia.
Lieu's impressionist works in the exhibit, Sea 80 Square, each feature a mother protector as an elongated, cloaked figure in a conical hat or a face in the ocean.
"I would like to send a message to viewers to understand that the sea is like the mother," said Lieu. "I used the image of a mother's face as the face of this sea, this bay."
Colours vary from blues to greens, to reds and browns and violet to depict each stage of the ocean's condition, whether it be clear and clean or dirty and damaged.
Visitors and residents of Nha Trang say they can find fish swimming close to the beach one day but the water unswimmable the next because of styrofoam, plastic bags and pieces of wood.
"It was really up there compared with a lot of the places I've been. Beautiful," Tanya Anderson of the United States said on one boat after a dive to see the coral. "I saw a little bit of garbage and so it would be nice to clean up some of the garbage."
In one of Lieu's paintings, a smear of yellow and brown represents an oil slick threatening fish in the blue sea.
Oil spills have struck more than 20 coastal provinces this year, including Nha Trang in Khanh Hoa province. Vietnamese media report that more than 1720 tonnes of oil have been scraped off the beaches and water.
A series of investigations speculated oil came from a leaking oil rig, damaged tanker or oil and gas platforms in the South China Sea.
Environmental awareness and "sustainable development" are built into the Government's socio-economic plans to lift people out of poverty, but constant construction and proliferation of tourist sites make it difficult to carry out.
A masterplan to collect and dispose of waste was being worked on, said Truong Kinh, director of Nha Trang Bay Marine Protected Area Authority.
"Now we are facing some challenges and difficulties such as fast urbanisation, the waste coming from industrial, agricultural sectors and daily living."
The Government said earnings from sea and seaside business would account for 54 per cent of gross domestic product in 2020, increasing pressure to meet economic targets.
In the southern beach town of Phan Thiet in Binh Thuan province, resort owner Pascal Lefebvre said schools were educating young people about how to dispose of rubbish in environmentally sound ways.
"Any developing country faces those problems. Officials understand the need to preserve the environment here, however it is often a matter of budget and who will finance the plans," Lefebvre said.
A Vietnamese non-governmental organisation, the Centre for Marinelife Conservation and Community Development, works with fishermen in Khanh Hoa province. Centre director Nguyen Thu Hue said it encouraged fishermen to "take ownership of the water" so they could play an active part in their own business plans.
"What we tell them is that if the environment is ignored, you will have nothing left to live on," she said.
In other parts of Vietnam, research has revealed that rivers are dying and air pollution is above internationally accepted levels in the capital, Hanoi. Surface water in Hanoi was unusable for agriculture or for domestic use, a report in April by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said. The waterways of the biggest urban area, Ho Chi Minh City, were even worse and considered "dead".
It said most enterprises did not have or did not use wastewater treatment and domestic wastewater was out of control.
- REUTERS