Tet dragon dance. Hoa (Chinese) Vietnamese, Cholon District, Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Ellen Kaplowitz

A journey is a bridge between two points. In Vietnam, some journeys take place on roads, highways, railways, rivers and footpaths as family members come home for the New Year, hunters travel into the forest and city dwellers carry precariously balanced goods on bicycles and motorbikes. Other journeys are metaphorical: life is a journey marked by significant rituals, and the year is a journey mapped by a calendar. Souls travel to the netherworld, while gods and ancestors return to the human world during celebrations in their honor.

Every year, more than a million tourists visit Vietnam, a country that many of them first knew from images of a war. Among these tourists, too, are former American servicemen, who have made their own pilgrimages to Vietnam as acts of healing and reconciliation. Still other travelers–those born in Vietnam but now living abroad–will always call this place "home."

In this exhibition, we invite you to journey through a changing Vietnam and to experience the incredible diversity of its landscape and its people.

VIDEO: Journeys in Vietnam Today This video provides glimpses of some of the many types of journeys explored in this exhibition. You will need to have the Real Player installed on your computer to view this video. (Program length: 4:00 minutes.)