Tuan's Story

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Some art shows are all about shaking up a viewer's notions of beauty. This one just might challenge your positions on punishment, rehabilitation and redemption.

No sugarcoating: Tuan Huynh, today's featured artist, is serving prison time for felony murder. Not has served . . . is serving. He won't be eligible for parole until June 21, 2011.

Tuan is part of the InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI) program in Lansing, Kansas.

IFI aims to provide inmates with educational and life skills while they are imprisoned and with transitional support after their releases. Huynh is one of the organization's success stories.

Few might have predicted that in 1996, when he entered a no-contest plea to felony murder. Huynh was barely 18 but deeply involved in gang activity when he fired into a crowd outside a Hutchinson restaurant, killing Charles J. Smith. He has spent every birthday since then behind bars—and until 2004, racking up a list of violations ranging from misuse of state property to trafficking in contraband.

Since then: nothing. A clean record.

This isn't a mere sideshow, though—it's an art opening, and Huynh is an artist whose work needs no back-story to prop it up. His acrylic paintings are marked not only by fine brushwork but by layers of emotion.

Huynh's portraits, most of family members, are both beautifully detailed and infused with obvious affection and a sense of linging. His renditions of big cats are bold and colorful . . . but the predators' eyes are almost mournful. And his icons, both religious and secular—as with the twin portrait of Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, pictured above, also show the cost of serving and freeing others. Jesus is a "man of sorrows", as Huynh depicts him, and so are Dr. King and the Great Emancipator.

At the art show people might have been leery of his past. That can't be helped. But it's to be hoped that he also will find people who thought of him not as "Tuan Huynh, prisoner" or "Tuan Huynh, killer," but as "Tuan Huynh, artist and fellow human being."

Those moments will be freeing . . . and not only for Huynh.