DSpace at VNU: Cutural exchange in Vietnamese contemporary art: loss or gain

CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE
CONTEMPORARY ART: LOSS OR GAIN?
Iola Lenzi* - Natalia Kraevskaia

Borrowing across cultures is universal and historical, as old as the movement
o f human civilizations. The great ceramic art o f China’s Yuan and Ming Dynasties,
o f global art historical primacy, was tributary not only to Persian technical
knowledge, but to forms derived from Middle-Eastern metal wares(l). In early
twentieth century Paris, the seminal painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
collected tribal statuary from black Africa which triggered new ideas prompting
them to produce Cubism. Cubism would then play a key role in the artistic
revolution that was twentieth century Western modernising).
Cultural exchange from one period to another is common as well, revivals of
older styles and artistic ideologies as frequent in Europe as in Asia. The
Renaissance, fourteenth century Europe’s return to Greek and Roman classicism, is
amongst the most salient borrowings in art history, as well as in the broader world
o f ideas. China too has a well-documented tradition o f artistic revisiting over
millennia, archaistic works o f art -paintings, bronzes and ceramics- drawing
inspiration from art o f the past-(3). Indeed, in the case o f China, formal reappropriation o f the ancient has a canonic function(4).
The origins o f ideas, icons, and languages o f art are not always clear, the freer
and more porous their geographic and cultural environment, the more likely they are
to mutate and re-emerge from one zone or period to the next, losing their initial
identifying markers in appearance and ethos.
Cultural transfer can be a messy or even violent business, one culture resisting
the integration o f another, registering opposition by either refusing to acknowledge
it, or taking in totems o f the foreign wholesale as a form o f critique. In other cases,
assimilation is seamless, home cultures receptive to new concepts and visual

* Lasalle College of the Arts-Goldsmith, Singapore
** Assoc. Prof. Russian State University for the Humanities, Institute of the Oriental Cultures,
Moscow

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V IÍT NAM HỌC - KỶ YÉU HỘI THẢO QUỐC TÉ LÀN THỨ TU

repertoires, the latter rapidly digested and adapted, the alien indieenized and
meshed with the local.
In recent decades, globalization has accelerated exchange processes, fast and
afprdable

communication,

cheap

mass-travel

etc...

facilitating

circulation

neworks, and erasing boundaries. This rapidity and brutality o f contact and
peietration

have

sometimes

provoked

institutional

reaction

aeainst

foreign

iniuence, cultural protectionism frequent, particularly in contexts where outside
cutures are perceived as hegemonic and so assumed to weaken local ones, once
charly-defined

national

cultural

boundaries

now

challenged.

This

can

be

paticularly true when strong nationalist ideology is deployed to cement voune

stites. In France, where the State considers the English language - and by extension
A m erica n m a s s - c u lt u r e - a th r e a t to

French

la n g u a g e a n d c u ltu r e , la w s g o v e r n in g

ralio broadcasting stipulate that at least 40% o f aired sonss must be in the native
toigue durins prime hours(5). Whether this cultural manipulation fulfils its aim of
‘pOtecting’ French, is debatable. And though the subject is beyond the scope o f this
p£>er, it is historically apparent that institutional interference with outside cultural
inluence, over time has little positive impact, and possibly a detrimental one on
lo'al artistic expressions. Conversely, cultural exchange, especially when nurtured
frim the ground up by loosening controls in a variety o f spheres, can enrich creative
h;oits, strengthening home culture rather than homogenizing or robbing it o f its
inligenous characteristics.
CULTURAL TRAFFIC IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
In Southeast Asia, cultural infiltration and adaptation have been defining
characteristics o f artistic expression over millennia. Ethnically, linguistically and
rtíigiously diverse, the peoples o f the region forced their respective indigenous
cultures from the seeds o f Chinese and Indian ones, with European and Arab
ntluences thrown in the mix. From the earliest times, cultural exchange was
pevalent, highly developed pre-colonial maritime trade routes binding insular and
naritime Southeast Asia and linking the region to the world bevond. A tradeirduced outward-lookins mentality, intra-regional migration, and a syncretic
a it ide to arriving faiths, have asserted cultural exchange as a vital regional force
f,r thousands o f years. Moreover, in the modern period -earlier in Philippines-,
gjuiheast Asians were subjected to colonisation in name or spirit - in Siam-, new
ideologies arriving with the European imperialists. Thus, it can be argued that in
sire ways Southeast Asia experienced the cultural effects o f globalisation centuries
bfore the term was coined.

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CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE.

Within the broader context o f syncretic Southeast Asia, contemporry
Vietnam, with its long and continuous history of movement o f populations ad
id e a s , s ta n d s o u t a s a

place o f

e x t r e m e c u ltu r a l in f ilt r a t io n ,

adaptation, and E-

projection outward. Not surprisinglv, in Vietnam the search for a framing )f
personal and national identity is today a recurring one, in visual art as in the v/ier
arena. To better understand the various strands o f influence, reception, Eprojection, and their ultimate play in modern and contemporary Vietnamese Visul
art, th is p a p e r a tt e m p t s a n u n t a n g lin g o f th e lo c a l fr o m th e i n c o m in g , a s W ell IS

discussing the different motives governing ways artists today interpret and ue
indigenous and extraneous elements in their practice.
REMARKS ON THE VIETNAMESE SITUATION
Indigenous elements
Village culture
Vietnamese art originated and matured in the village, peoples’ innate aestiec
sensibility reflected in the elegance o f everyday metal, bamboo or Woodn
objects(6). Unlike China where the aristocracy had always patronized a ris e
development, for many centuries Vietnam was a place o f anonymous village

produced by peasants' craft communities. According to Vietnamese art histoiias
the most deeply-rooted indigenous national art consists o f the village comrrunl
house đình. Its architecture varying from North to South, this domestic construDtin
exhibits richly multiform external decoration, and inside presents decorative eaivig
including classical motifs such as draeons and dragon's heads, phoenix, faris
flames and sometimes floral ornamentation, mythological themes, and siens
of daily rural life. These images in particular, in their rough technique, hunor
irony, and directness of expression, show the capacity o f ancient sculptcrso
overcome the taboos o f social convention and manifest a creativity relatvuncommon in feudal Vietnamese society(7).
The multifunctional aspect o f the communal house should also be stressei le
đình a place for worshiping the village deity, conducting meetings about comnual
affairs, and holding celebrations. It is arguably this synthetic approach to the Usof
space, so typical o f Vietnamese mentality and practice(8), that later contributes o
the ease and naturalness with which contemporary artists ally site, installation ad
performance, as illustrated in Truone Tan and Nguyen Quang H uy’s 196
Waterbuffalo perform ance, Dao Anh Khanh’s 2012 Slow Walk, and piects y
Hoang Duons Cam.

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Communal-house sculpture representing everyday agrarian life o f the 17th- 19th
Cinury was rough rather than refined. Yet it is this genre, quite different to the
Cimnic and more iconographically standardised mythological and reliaious
Cinings, that at the turn o f the twentieth century surfaces, adapted, in Dinh Cong

Eat s and Nguyen Nhu Y ’s sculpture, and Hoang Hong C a m ’s naive painting style,
lAncient civilizations/ tribal-minority influences
Many contemporary Vietnamese sculptors also find inspiration in the
Sf:uptural legacy o f the great civilizations which once flourished on the territory o f
ttodern Vietnam -Champa and the ancient Khmer empires-(9), while others exploit
tl e imagery and aesthetics o f tribal groups residing in Vietnam. Thus the ritual art
of he ethnic tribes o f the Tay Neuyen Plateau in central Vietnam colours the
C'ettive work o f Nguven Nhu Y. His wooden sculptures resemble tomb figures
fiom that area, reflecting the artist's naive approach to reality, as well as his
Confident ability to abstract.
In the last century ethnicity has been a problematic theme in Vietnamese art,
its acceptance subjected to the prevailing political situation. Even the works o f the
revolutionary artist Mai Van Hien, and those o f Nguyen Sang, acclaimed as one o f
fou- pillars o f Vietnamese modern art, suffered restrictions imposed by the
Vietnamese Art Association(lO). From there on references to minority culture in the
visual art o f kinh (indigenous Vietnamese)had a complex, multilayered character:
apart from ethno-touristic drawings, artists such as Mai Any Dung produced works
showing a deep knowledge o f and respect for the traditions o f different ethnic
grcups; these works can also engage with the nation’s heterogeneous cultural
identity, advocate the tribe peoples’ rights (Dang Anh Tuan and Nguyen Thanh
Soi) ( 1 1 ), or allude to ecological, social and cultural problems in the mountain
areas, such as does Dang Thi Tham Poong. Tham Poona, descended from White
Thai and Muong, speaks about the life o f the Northern hill tribes enriching her
Visual vocabulary both with traditional symbolism and contemporary metaphors.
Alcng with her graphic evocations o f ethnic minority traditional costumes, Tham
Poena sometimes includes real weaving or embroidery in her work as material
reference to the tribal wom en’s position in modern society.
Contemporary artists often mix indigenous Vietnamese culture with exterior
elements, either local ethnic reference or Western ones, thus transforming the

system of conventional codes. Nguyen Minh Thanh, for example, in his 2000 Nha
San Due installation The party used Vietnamese flat rice pan-cakes to imitate
ancient Taoist drawings, placing them alongside real Dao shamanistic ritual masks
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CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMEiE.

in order to accentuate the contradiction between desired eternity and
temporality.

ea

Prints and paper
Another still-subsisting indigenous tradition is woodblock printmaking wKci
is believed to have emerged in the 11th century as a means of disseminainị
Confucian. Daoist and Buddhist ideas. The religious and ritual vocation o f the prnti
was later reinforced by Hanoi’s Hang Trong School prints which displaying obvbư
signs o f Chinese influence, were a mainstay for several centuries, populari/in;
Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. In the art o f contemporary Vietnin,
references to religious painting and prints if not widely popular, nonetheless remiii>
revealed by Buddhist subjects, the prevalence o f the scroll form, and in wo'ki'
composition. Strong links to religious art are found in the works of Le Quoc \ie ,
who subtly incorporates both modern formal elements and ideas into thỉ
composition and concept o f his religious-looking art.
Folk prints with non-religious themes were first produced in the 14-]5ti
centuries by artisans from Dong Ho village in Bac Ninh province, becoiĩinỊ
popular in the 18th and 19 century when similar print-making centres also appeirei
in Kim Hoang, Ha Tay province, and Sinh, near Hue. These prints, featuring rinl
social activities as well as historical heroes and events, served as a festive hcrrs

decoration during the lunar New Year period. The images of animals and baby-bo}S
with different domestic birds or fish constituted encoded wishes o f health, succeiS
in studies, and prosperity, amongst others for the coming New Year. The traditionil
prints appear unchanged technically and artistically over centuries, only tier
thematic range widening as a result o f shifting realities. Although Dong Ho piins
are n o lo n g e r p o p u la r a m o n g th e lo c a l p o p u la t io n , th e ir r ic h im a g e r y f in d s its ’V
into works by contemporary artists, playing a crucial conceptual role in Nguyen
Nhu Y ’s 2002-2005 Calendars series, and Hanoi artist Pham Huy Thong’s 20052009 Updated series. Both artists use the ironic tinge that is a distinctive feature of
Dong Ho pictures, but if Nhu Y transforms the traditional images with b e n e v c le it
humour, Thong redesigns their compositions incorporating signs o f present-day li e
to critique contemporary society’s consumerism, corruption, rich and poor dhicfc,
and spiritual impoverishment.
Ceramics
Among the indigenous artifacts which entered contemporary practice,
ceramics also deserve mention, especially the m edium ’s use in installation at.
Vietnamese ceramic history goes back before Chinese domination. Vietnamese

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VIỆT INAM HỌC - KỶ YÉU HỘI THẢO QUỐC TÉ LẰN THỦ T ư

potery combining indigenous elements with those derived from neighboring
culures such as the Khmer. Champa. Indian, and especially Chinese(12). has
su riv ed over time, admired and collected by elites, and cherished by commoners,
its talus far above that o f other household utensils. Central as utilitarian vessels,
and connected to religion and ritual through function, ceramics constitute the
essoice o f Vietnamese traditional life. Their elesance and connection to traditional
lifeare key features o f the realistic paintings o f Bui Viet Dung. Buo Hoai Mai, and

Phing Quoc Tri.
I f ceramics feature as decorative devices in paintings, they can be used more
corceptually in installation art. Some, such as Nguven Bao Toan. feature them
cenrally in their installations. As Australian academic Ann Proctor notes, in most
of lis works " Bao Toan transposes everyday objects into a different space and
imiues them with a new internal m eaning or I02 ÌC which can either be related to a
Daiist world view, village culture, life cycles, transformations or Vietnamese
liteature"(13).
Le Quoc Viet develops a more literary approach to the use of ceramics in his
insallations. In his Wordless he includes I 72 plates and 101 balls with poems in
Chnese Han and Vietnamese Nom characters, thus borrowing not only the outward
aeihetic features o f ancient ceramics, but also one o f its functional destinations - to
coiserve court literary heritage over time.
A number o f contemporary artists have chosen ceramics as their medium for
prtducing sculpture. The creative practice o f these ceramic sculptors was a subject
of .comprehensive research by Ann Proctor who examined it from the perspective oi'
its craft or art nature, thematic variations, and the correlation o f tradition and
midcrnity. among others(14). Finally, contemporary Vietnamese artists, several of
wlom discussed later in this paper, have used porcelain vessels as a support for
thiir painting, conceptual principals motivating them to couple the ancient
utlitarian medium with narratives commenting the everyday(15).
Providing a historical context for recent developments in Vietnamese art,
Aistralian curator and academic Ian Howard discusses ties linking rural culture and
ccitemporary art. particularly the latter’s predilection for craft and folk media, its
aetheticism, and attraction to village themes, explored critically or
ex>erimentally(16). However, some artists also preserve decorative and folk
elements in their works to satisfy market expectations, mainstream buyers, mostly
fceigners, attracted by their exoticism and explicit Vietnamese features.
The specific connections between rural and urban life, traditional and new
ferns o f artistic expressions, and the continuing usaee o f local materials, frustrate

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CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE.

the temptation to draw parallels between the strong presence o f indigenous
traditions and folk art in Vietnamese contemporary art, and a similar situation in the
surging interest in the local and folk art among European artists at the turn of the
19 h century. In Europe, the absorption o f folk elements into modern art was a
reaction aaainst orthodox academicism and the rationalism o f industrial society,
rather than an outlining of national boundaries. On the contrary in Vietnamese
modern and contemporary art, the inclusion or derivation of indigenous elements
often indicates national identity. Most importantly, unlike in Europe, in Vietnam
this tradition was never interrupted.
French influence
External influences on Vietnamese art are discussed in Boi Tran Huynh's
work on Vietnamese aesthetics where she contends that pre-colonial art is not just a
form o f pure 'unaffected' village art as some Vietnamese art historians view it, but a
more complex synthesis o f various influences "resulting from migration and
acquisition o f new territories", or from an infusion o f Chinese, Neo-Confucian and
Buddhist elements into traditional village art( 17). This assertion suggests a broader
range o f extraneous impacts to indigenous Vietnamese forms in religious, domestic,
military, and royal architecture, infrastructure such as bridges, and in decorative
patterns adorning buildings.
Adapting new foreign elements, Vietnamese culture still retained its essential
qualities, a central Chinese influence in visual art integrated with local art practice.
This consolidation o f indigenous features and outside influences in visua art
created the base for future artistic developments in the colonial period, marked not
only by Western or French influence, but also by the emergence of Vietnamese

modernism, both in visual art and literature.
Literature
Cultural borrowings in Vietnamese literature first appeared as different scripts.
These evolved as Classical Chinese (Hán Văn) and Chữ nôm (Chinese scripts
adapted for Vietnamese), the latter, though formed as far back as the thirteenth
century, always failing to be eiven official status, and instead remaining a language
of the elite and notable writers and poets(18). By the early twentieth century, both
Classical Chinese and Chữ nôm , which coexisted and covered different sphens o f
language function, had been replaced by the Latinized script Quốc Ngữ vhich
though created in the seventeenth century, was not popular until its everyday isage
was imposed by the French colonial government. While some saw this cutural
coercion as an implantation of French/ Western values designed to uproo the
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VIỆT NAM HỌC - KỶ YẾU HỘI THẢO QUÔC TẾ LẰN T H Ứ T ư

Vietnamese

from

their ancient

literature(19),

others

recognized the policy's

educational role in the pre-and post-revolutionary fight against illiteracy, so supported

it as a means o f spreading nationalist literature, and later revolutionary ideas(20).
With the transition to Quốc Ngữ script, new literary forms with no equivalent
in traditional Vietnamese literature appeared, and with these, the growth o f modern
literature, including the novel and play, the first modern Vietnamese theatrical
production, A cup o f Poison (Chén thuốc độc) by Vũ Đình Long, put on at the
Hanoi Opera House in 1921. American historian Wynn Wilcox speaks o f "the rising
use o f French and Romanised Vietnamese {quốc ngữ ), the increasingly
Europeanized education and cultural tastes o f the metropolitan elite, and the
political realities o f colonialism in Vietnam", all plaving “a role in creating a
demand for new forms o f theatre"(21). Thus colonial language policy positioned
Vietnamese intellectuals and writers in the context o f Eurocentric cosmopolitanism,
opening a vast Western literary tradition to them(22). Foreign cultural borrowings,
mainly French, o f the' early twentieth century, were less due to colonial politics than
to the rejection o f old lifestyles and a new elite and intelligentsia’s wish to adopt a
modern identity(23).
Though the "Civilising Mission" (Mission Civilisatrice) proclaimed by the
colonial authorities had a dual goal -to enlighten as well as reap economic
profit(24), it also led to progressive educational reforms. These resulted in the
establishment o f new schools, including some which introduced the teaching of
crafts and applied arts in ways encouraging an expressive experimentation not
generally part o f traditional guild training. This innovation had the objective and
result o f increasing and refining Vietnamese craft production (Bien Hoa School o f
Applied Arts - 1903. Gia Dinh Drawing school in Saigon - 1913, among others).
Particularly important was the 1925 Hanoi opening o f the Fine Arts College o f
Indochina (L'Ecole des Beaux Art de rindochine-EBAI). Hanoi’s first art school
implemented European Art Academy standards o f the day. The study o f anatomy,
drawing o f classical busts, field trips, faculties split according to medium, and a
clear focus on Neo-Classicism in painting were the mainstay o f its curriculum, the
latter also shaped by the tastes o f its principal teachers Victor Tardieu and Joseph
Inguimberty.

I f various modernist trends recently current in Europe -expressionism, cubism,
futurism, abstraction, Dadaism, surrealism etc...- were ignored by the curriculum,
the school was still radically modern in the context o f Vietnam. "Westernization”
coincided with the young educated generation’s ambition to emancipate itself from
Confucian limitations, replacing these with individualistic expression that in turn
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prompted the emergence o f a new profession: artist-as-creator rather than craftmaker. Further, the establishment o f EBA1 and other such schools progressively
opened up the world o f art to non-elite Vietnamese. This slowly increasing access to
students from all strata o f Vietnamese society, through entrance competitions etc...
, would by the late twentieth century have an impact on the widening o f artistic
practices and so the development o f local contemporary art.
With the introduction o f Western oil on canvas, French teachers also
encouraged the development o f traditional crafts as well as the revision o f their
aesthetic possibilities. Thus, under the guidance o f Tardieu, Nguyen Phan Chanh,
not satisfied with oil, discovered Chinese silk painting, creating masterpieces on silk
that incorporated Western drawing skills and the pictorial idiom o f Vietnamese folk
woodblock prints(25).
Another achievement resulting from foreign impetus was EBAI-prompted
experimentation on indigenous media, including the transformation o f lacquer from
a decorative medium to one o f fine art. In Vietnam today lacquer painting is a
significant part o f art production, but less than a century ago, it was used
exclusively for crafting utilitarian objects, puppetry, religious and ritual sculpture,
and architectural details. In the 1920s artists from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de
l’Indochine were the first to use lacquer in fine art. Inguimberty, who taught oil
painting, having been exposed to the beauty o f lacquer religious objects and
decoration o f Hanoi temples, in 1928 established the school's department o f lacquer

with the aim of developing this traditional medium. However, lacquer paintings
were not considered o f real artistic legitimacy until the

1940th when the

experiments o f Nguyen Gia Tri, a graduate o f 1936, surpassed his teachers’
expectations, these poetic and elegant works confirming lacquer’s fine-art
status(26). Still today lacquer’s unpredictable effects attract, the m edium ’s
decorative power inseparable from its artistic potency, this alliance in line with
traditional Vietnamese aesthetic principles(27). At that time, along with the growing
popularity o f lacquer and silk techniques, oil painting became deeply rooted in
Vietnamese art, and even after the French left the colony, was regarded as a
Vietnamese modern-art medium rather than a foreign implant(28).
Though cultural institutions such as the EBAI, research centres (L'Ecole
Francaise d'Extreme Orient), the University o f Indochina, the Hanoi Opera,
museums, archives, and libraries were built by French colonial authorities as
instruments o f political power(29), they would also contribute to the development
o f modern ideas and culture in Vietnam, solid foundations nurturing national fine
arts, literature, and research activities. In the case o f museums, though their general
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concept and methodologies o f collecting, conservation, and public display were first
introduced by the French, since the Geneva agreement the Vietnamese government
has continued as custodian o f the national heritage conserved in Vietnamese
museums, ensurine their endurina activity in the country. New museums such as
Hanoi's Vietnam Museum o f Ethnology, and Vietnam W om en's Museum have
been created as well, showine contemporary Vietnam's dynamic will to pursue

cultural objectives(30).
INFLUENCE OF SOVIET REALISM
The Ecole des Beaux Arts de rindochine period, with its emphasis on
hierarchical structure and academism, was followed by a Socialist Realism period,
imprinted with all the communitv-inspired values o f before, enriched with new
ideology. Communist China's and the Soviet Union's influence led to shifts in art
policy direction and increased control over art production. In 1957 the Art
Association was formed(31). Similar to the Soviet Artists Union, Vietnam's Art
Association governed the art community until the early post-doi moi years,
establishing the list o f artists allowed to exhibit at home and abroad, as well as the
content of exhibitions. The Association also regulated the status o f artists depending
on the political correctness o f their work, deciding who was able to obtain art
materials during times o f economic hardship, and defining art’s content and forma!
criteria. Themes o f war and revolution, glorification o f workers' labor, and the joys
o f peasant life, were deemed to appropriately express socialist ideology. For
decades socialist hegemony and rules in creative work limited artists’ search for
self-realization. Yet there were endeavors to step out o f this frame which resulted in
the emergence o f unsanctioned creative works.
Among the artists who didn't accept the constraints o f Socialist Realism were
Duong Bich Lien, Nguyen Sang, Nguyen Tu Nghiem, and Bui Xuan Phai.
Undervalued during the socialist realist period, after doi m oi these artists were
recognized as 'Masters o f Modernism' or ' Four Great Pillars' o f art(32). Nguyen
Sang, who depicted war and revolutionary combat scenes among others, and
Nguyen Tu Nehiem with his passion for folk and tradition, were interested in
modernist expressive idioms influenced by cubist forms.

Duone Bich Lien

persevered with colonial genres such as portraiture and landscape, while Bui Xuan
Phai explored a range o f themes which strayed beyond the borders of 'correct'

i d e o l o g y , in c lu d in g

still-life, nudes, Cheo traditional theatre, abstracts, and his

celebrated Hanoi street-scapes. Phai, who from the 1990's was internationally
famous, was still a decade a so considered decadent by Vietnamese art officials.
This was due to the painter's perceived pessimistic attitude, incompatible with

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socialist realism's positive spin on life, and his style's ties with European m odernist
trends of the earlv twentieth century.
THE CO N TEM PO R A RY SITUATION
Vietnam's visual art w orldpost-doi moi
For the last century, the course o f Vietnamese visual art has been inextricably
tied to the nation's historical trajectory. Twentieth century artistic practices have
been pushed and pulled ideologically by forces both inside and outside the country
visual culture, never immutable even in the most stable context, in Vietnam ’s case
metamorphosed in ways unprecedented elsewhere. French colonialism and
particularly its art education system, nationalist revolt, North-South partition, the
American war, Ho Chi M inh’s liberation, Southern exodus after the 1975
reunification, and seo-political ties with the ex-Soviet Union, have all left their
imprint on Vietnam and her visual art practices. More recently, as the nation has
opened economically further to do I moi, as Viet-kieu have returned to the country
after decades overseas, and in the wake o f Vietnam 's 2007 entry into the World
Trade Organisation, exterior culture and values have once again washed over the
country, testing its cultural porosity.

Today V ietnam ’s visual artists, many o f them in contact with the outside
world from both inside Vietnam and beyond her borders, have new ideas relating to
their vocation as cultural players. As contemporary practitioners rather than
modernist painters, they do not describe or reproduce life in a literal manner, but
instead are more interested in using their art to ask questions, project impacts, or
navigate complex and multiple cultural realities so as to make sense o f the world.
What they present cannot be depicted through straight narrative, but instead must be
referenced through different pictorial and conceptual strategies, many o f which
involve a broad repertoire o f signs representing intangible ideas. These signs and
ideas used by contemporary artists to explain Vietnam in the world, and the world
to Vietnam, are frequently the product o f cultural borrowing, internal or external,
and plucked from myriad sources, geographic, intellectual, and historical. In the
following sections, we attempt to distinguish, characterise, and analyse borrowing
strategies employed by Vietnamese artists today.
Giving local relevance to foreign borrowings- appropriating emblems o f
consumer society: derivation, endorsement, absorption, or critique?
From the 1990s, various types o f incoming ideas have competed for attention
in Vietnamese visual art. Consumer culture, with its emphasis on packaging,
advertising logos, and brand-display-and-ownership as a mark o f social status, is

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am onest the most significant. Originating in the prosperous West, as a result of
greater Vietnamese wealth at the turn o f the century, consumer culture permeates
the country. Even as in some developed economies intellectuals reject it, at the
dawn o f the new millennium brand culture becomes localized and a central theme o f
contemporary art.

Presented directly, in the art o f some it is integrated without alteration,
ostensibly as a manifestation o f contemporary life. The Hanoi painter Ha Manh
Than2 's(b. 1980) series Not M emory o f 2009-2010 is an example o f this neutral
treatment o f incoming cultural codes. In his pictorial narratives, obviously
Vietnamese figures wearing ao dai, m ilit a r y fatigues, or Hue-style court robes, are
positioned against a backdrop o f international brand identifiers -Louis Vuitton.
Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty-. Thus the artist sets up an easily-leeible dichotomy of
cliche, pitting the outward clues o f tradition, as denoted by archetypal clothing,
against a clearly demarcated stage-set o f external cultural markers(33). The parable
is non-committal, the paintings glibly disengaged despite their supposed satirical
stance. However visually seductive, -luminous palette, technical virtuosity-, they
provide commentary about packaging, not content, visiting the banal fact of cultural
infiltration, but not its effects. In their vacant lining up o f well-understood emblems
o f conspicuous consumption, contrasted with a pastiche o f the local, such works,
made all over developing Asia, offer a crude cultural criticism. Derivative OÍ this
genre, they are generic in appearance as well as message, so for all their
borrowings, fail to illuminate Vietnam grappling with transformation.
Some artists however use totems o f consumer culture critically, to foster a
thinking, resistant response to the perceived negative impact o f social and moral
changes ambushing the nation. The semiotic and structural differences between the
paintings o f Ha Manh Thang and Nguyen Van Cuong(b. 1972) reveal contrasting
perspectives.
In his inks, murals (now all erased), and ceramics o f the late 1990s. Hanoi
artist Nguyen Van Cuong's appropriation of foreign/contemporary/urban icons
articulates an involvement not apparent in Ha Manh T han g's works a decade later.
Cuong’s fetishising (1998 Franklin series) o f the image o f Benjamin Franklin as
depicted on the American dollar bill -a universally-understood symbol o f
Capitalism, particularly meaning-laden in Communist Vietnam-, and his ongoing
representation o f black-suited male karaoke bar crawlers(1997 Karaoke ser es),
exhibiting lascivious and sadistic behavior with naked, bound women their subjects,

testify to the painter/performance artist‘s(34) indictment o f V ietnam 's fin-de-siscle
moral decay. But C uo ne's imagery does not intend a critique o f Western values oer-

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CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE.

se (by the late 1990s th e a r t is t has travelled extensively and has first-hand
knowledge o f lifestyles and value codes on three continents beyond Asia), but rather
a questioning o f Vietnam's uncritical appetite for the worst attributes o f material
society, it is the wholesale transplantation o f materialism that is problematic to
Cuoniĩ, who describes the phenomenon as Cultural Pollution^35). Unlike the static
paintings o f Ha Manh Thang. Cuona's weavinas o f signs -Franklin, karaoke
microphones, mobile telephones, TV sets, whiskey bottles, hypodermic needlesinto hyperactive pictorial narratives, challenge their audience on the effects o f
cultural exchange. These paintings, their Vietnamese text - ironic or vulgartargeting home audiences so anchoring them in the local, transform the foreign into
the familiar, thus eliciting discomfort and response about the rationale and impact o f
sociocultural shift, and its attendant loss. Through their meshing of icons, they
encase actively, the viewer made responsible for the promise and compromise o f
today's Vietnam.
Cuona exploits form to heighten message, his mixed realistic/cartoonexpressionist painterly style, sophisticated composition, and juxtapositions of
symbols -sexual depravity with indigenous imagery including farmers, oxen,
monks, official loudspeakers, traditional architecture- jolt in their integration o f
violence into the everyday. In its dance o f references and subverted meanings,
Cuong’s startling lavering o f two worlds translates the ambiguous choices facing

Vietnamese citizens at the turn o f the century, the w orks universally relevant in
their articulation of problems inherent to a slobalised world o f inescapable cultural
intersection. In pictures that materialise Vietnamese an^st as tradition is abandoned
for the new, the artist plays a double role, that o f participant -sadistic master or

alternately victim-, as well as external voyeur, mere observer o f debauchery. This
insider/outsider perspective, speaking o f the complexity o f social responsibility
confronting active and passive citizen attitudes, creates psychological tension, so
increasing the works’ impact. Further, Cuong’s choice o f media supports his
ambivalent view of.V ietn am ’s cultural and societal dilemmas at the turn o f the
century: do paper and porcelain, particularly indigenous to Vietnam, are used
repeatedly, their fragility and association with ancient artistic practices suggesting
Cuong’s loyalty to his own Vietnam , while also saluting traditional society’s ability
to assimilate contemporary/imported/urban vices(36).
Presenting another type o f cultural borrowing, recent works by Hanoi artist
Nguyen N ehia Cuong (b. 1973) marry brand logos appearing on domestic and
foreign packaging. with the female nude(37). Incorporating advertising; imagery into
his pictures such that text and insignia are vagina and breasts o f his corpulent

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VIỆT NAM HỌC - KỶ YÉU HỘI THẢO QUÓC TÉ LẦN THỦ TƯ

Venuses, the artist contrives the literal and symbolic crossing o f sexuality and
consumer culture. Though this meldina exists everywhere, Nguyen Nghia C uong’s
affection for his women gives the viewer clues to local meaning. For passive as is
Nguyen's expressively painted Venus, she, rather than the encroaching brand
imagery, is the w ork's central focus, her dominant status understood through vivid
palette and gestural brushwork. Nghia C u o n s's Venus, perhaps flawed, is beautiful,
everyone’s girl next door, firmly rooted in home soil(38). In the alienating, often
surreal world o f today's Vietnam, she is ambushed by the superficiality o f material
culture, local and foreign alike. Yet she retains her dignity and identity even as she
is obliged to accept I020 S and signs as body parts. Nguyen Nghia C uong’s Beauties
High Q uality series, about the cultural incongruity o f to day's Vietnam, also hints at

the possibility o f beauty’s survival in the face o f global mass-culture's invasion.
Saigon-based multi-media practitioner Bui C one Khanh(b.l 972) deploys
mixed emblems for the sake o f social commentary. Looking at Vietnamese society
o f the last decade via its image culture, Khanh dissects the effect o f new but
quickly-embraced consumer habits and the many paradoxes surfacing when a rural
society rooted in tradition undergoes fast-paced transformation.
His 2005 video performance Dollar man{39) is characterised bv its simple
visual script, the artist shown plastering him self in greenbacks, the piece
metaphorically and literally examining the muting, blinding and suffocating effcct
o f consumer culture. The subject is frequently explored by Southeast Asian artists
but K hanh's version, with its combination o f burlesque vulgarity as the artist rolls
voluptuously in a sea o f money, and naive aesthetic poetry, distinguishes this work
as one o f visual and sensorial potency. Like Nguyen Van Cuong, Bui Cong Khanh
uses his art to actively involve audiences in the fractures cleaving contemporary
Vietnam.
Transpositions,

re-readings,

back and forth exchanges over continents,

cultures a nd time
Bui Cong K hanh's pictorial and conceptual manipulation o f mass-consumer
signs brings to the fore the complexity o f cultural exchange in Vietnam today, his
work illustrative o f the way totems and ideas move in numerous directions,
fertilizing and fertilized as they go, losing their original place-identity.
The artist’s Juice Can painting series o f 2009 takes aim at the random
commodification o f every aspect o f Vietnamese society since the advent o f do ị moi.
Juxtaposing the image o f the disposable metal drinks-can, and the basics o f social
organisation and personal hygiene -'juice o f power’;; ‘ju ice o f digestion’; ‘meetings

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CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE.

juice'-, the artist proposes a dual narrative, can as symbol o f imported Western mass
culture, juices universal markers of civilisation: power, love, lavatories, and
digestion-. In this way. Khanh announces an unexpected inversion. The metal can,
once a foreien consumer reference, has become local, while the cans’ contents,
iconographically indigenous, are shared universal realities. This re-arranging of
signs speaks shrewdly o f Vietnam ’s current state o f cultural limbo, and of the
reality o f cultural traffic, back and forth, trade ultimately following a circular route
rather than a one-way, West-to-East trajectory.
Saison-based u s Viet-kieu Tuan Andrew Nguyen(b. 1976) too reflects on the
effect o f cultural transfer in twenty-first century Vietnam, popular culture the
starting point for his conceptual pieces. His video/ survey installation o f 2009 UFOs
Sighted Over Ho Chi Mình City, Viet Nam(40) borrows the public questionnaire format
to investigate cultural positioning. The piece, tracking American and Vietnamese
frameworks, purports to examine the interviewee’s understanding of extra terrestrial
phenomena. Asking questions about how the Vietnamese project themselves into the
future, UFOs Sighted makes connections between different aspects of contemporary
Vietnam where cultures o f all kinds, borrowed or not, are absorbed, subverted, or
resisted, sometimes unconsciously. The survey, a marketing tool in developed
economies since the 1950’s, has only recently been introduced to Vietnam, consumer
poling proliferating since the country’s 2007 accession to the WTO. With its invasive
and voyeuristic connotations, possibilities of individual affirmation, self-revelation, and
biographical fabrication, and finally its incestuous relationship with consumer culture,
the survey is, in any context, a site o f cultural friction.
With its interroaation o f peoples’ habits and desires, Tuan N guyen’s work

projects into the future. It references the promise-discourse, an offshoot o f
consumer culture and modernity pervasive in Vietnam today. The promisediscourse, combining optimism and identity-affecting distortion, pushes citizens to
measure themselves, and their future, from outside as well as within their own
cultural boundaries, the latter slippery and moving. The w ork’s UFO topic also
alludes to the randomness o f cultural transfer. The UFO, an American obsession,
has no history in Vietnam, the Vietnamese not concerned with extra-terrestrial
activity, though ghosts are part o f local mythology. Touching upon the unknown,
otherness, and fear o f invasion, the art-work-as-survey probes a host o f Vietnam's
hidcen sub-currents, showing how foreign cultural codes can be made to speak
about Vietnam's hazy zones o f contradiction.
Cultural crossover ‘s unexpected results were also revealed in the Ho Chi
Mirth City exhibition Unknown M onsters by Tyke Witness/The Eyewitness held at

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VIỆT NAM HỌC - KỶ YẾU HỘI THẢO QUÓC TÉ LÀN THỨ T Ư

San Art in July 2008. Los Angeles-based Vietnamese-American graffiti-artist Burt
Quoc Nauyen here showed graffiti paintings on canvas. In their appropriation o f a
Western-orieinatins contestative genre, graffiti, the paintings brought to attention an
artistic medium that popular with todays’s Vietnamese youth, is still taboo for its
defiance o f order and control. By re-contextualizine graffiti's visual language as
well as its content - the w ork’s iconography related to V ietnam 's Yeti-, Tyke
launched a debate about cultural connections across national boundaries. Unknown
Monsters also challenged its audience to rethink relationships by projecting new and
opposite associations. In its pictorial evocation o f the Yeti, the work underscored
the urban/rural gulf by opposing, urban graffiti with village folk tales. However, the
piece also explores rural and urban commonalities in its comparison of graffiti's
inherent anarchical, danger-courting intent, with the fear-provokine myths rooted in

Vietnam's highland backwaters, embodied by the Yeti.
Parochial borrowings as a means o f exploring cultural tension
A feature o f contemporary art is its frequent use o f images to query rather than
describe. Amongst the most internationally-visible members o f the first generation
o f post-í/ỡ/ m oi experimental practitioners, Hanoi-based Vu Dan Tan(l 946-2009)
began his vanguard practice in the 1980's. A precocious Vietnamese exponent of
multi-disciplinary art(41), early on he utilised imagery and media that if foreign to
the conventions o f the Hanoi mainstream, were grounded in, and expressed, home
cultural forces.
In the 1980s Tan appropriated folk, tribal, and religious imagery which
developed into a new iconography, he painted onto the bottom o f flat, readilyavailable baskets. T a n ’s quotation o f the exotic-local, quizzing rather than
depicting, was unlike the interpretations o f minority tradition o f modern master
Nguyen Tu Nghiem(42). This work was innovative in intention and imagery, its
play on medium supporting concept. In addition, with these pieces Tan established a
critical dialogue with the existing European-originating paint-on-canvas discourse,
the transformed basket/proto-installations testing the boundaries o f art practices that
if by mid-century considered mainstream, were in fact, as we note above, only
recently imported to Vietnam. Thus Vu Dan Tan was transgressing the cultural
standards that many in the art establishment had forgotten were not local to begin
with. Bringing tribal and viUage-folk references close to the academy via new mixes
o f genre and sign, Tan used art to challenge the impact o f cultural exchange in
Vietnam, a debate that continues today. In their medium, imagery, lack of signature,
and purpose(43), T an’s works provided a home-comins, not through ethnographic
exotica, but instead through a strategic triggering o f ideas about the nation's layered
cultural make-up, and the complex tension governing insider-outsider influences.

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CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE

While French teachers o f EBAI had 'elevated’ lacquer from craft to fine art.
the introduction o f European art hierarchies, conversely, demoted ancient village
vernaculars, the newly imported hi-art/low art divide perpetuated by art school
academism diminishing the status of unsigned art. Amonẹst a number o f meanings,
Vu Dan T an’s espousal o f non-orthodox materials and craft techniques(44) can thus
be understood as challenging the colonially-imposed fine art/folk art divide dating
back to Western painting's introduction to early twentieth century Vietnam, and
later to the influence o f the French-run art schools. Tan has no bone to pick with
painting, as comfortable with brush and canvas as he is with found garbage. But he
queries the academic hierarchy o f senres that excludes vernacular languages as old
as Vietnam. In his early years o f practice, though clearly operating as an artist, he
refrained from signing his work, displaying his solidarity with anonymous craftmakers whose cultural position had been eroded by the imported canon. But rather
than aspiring to elevate craft to art, beyond medium and technique, his intention was
to exploit his base m aterials’ capacity to propose polyvalent sets o f meanings, the
artist taking his place amongst Vietnam’s first wave o f conceptual artists(45).
Vu Dan T a n 's subversion o f Hanoi’s itinerant street vendor’s glass-lidded
boxes comprises another type o f borrowing. Often containing cigarettes offered to
pedestrians, the hinged-top boxes were once characteristic o f peddlers' illegal street
commerce. Though now obsolete, in 1990s Hanoi, they were not only visually

iconic, but also tangibly represented defiance o f authority(46). Compact and
portable, these miniature shop-displays could be shut and hidden at a moment’s
notice, the capitalist-culprit cigarette-hawker, selling without a license, running off
with his shop-in-a-box as the police drew near. Though Tan does not overtly seek to
exploit this contextually-relevant aspect o f the boxes, this meaning necessarily finds
its way into their conceptual underpinnings(47).
From

the

mid-1990s

Vu

Dan Tan

arranges

his

miniature

cardboard

installations in these boxes, playing simultaneously on their foreign and parochial
references, allowing a r e a d i n g from both within and outside the Vietnamese frame:
while they are directly lifted from local street life, the boxes are also identified with
19th century European naturalists’ boxed flora/fauna collections. Intrinsic to Tan’s
concept, these w ooden shells both protect and isolate the objects they contain,
confusing audience viewpoint, so alluding to the way in which perspective shifts
according to o n e’s insider or outsider status(48), a central cultural problematic in
fast-changing Vietnam where social

and power hierarchies are being altered by

new wealth. T a n ’s container-installations, emerging from urban Hanoi vernacular
culture and the artist’s idiosyncratic idiom, are amongst his most conceptually
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VIỆT NAM HỌC - KỶ YÉU HỘI THẢO QUỐC TÉ LÀN THỬ TƯ

elegant borrowings/translations/re-statements. Perfectly illustrating the role o f
cultural appropriation and interpretation in the making of new codes, they incarnate
Vietnam 's late twentieth century cultural discourse.
Hanoi multi-disciplinary practitioner Nguyen Quane H u y (b .l9 7 I) examines
contemporary Vietnamese culture, and its exclusions inherent to fast-paced social
shifts, through the alternative perspective o f Vietnam's tribal
populations.
Exploring marginality and the evolving relationship between identity and nationalist
ideology, in 2006 Huy began producing large-scale portraits o f ethnic minority
women, a series he continues today. Vietnamese women have been at the centre o f
H u y’s art for over a decade, his depictions tackling the ambiguous position o f the
female gender in Vietnamese society as a means o f evoking wider cultural
issues(49).
Realistic oils, the portraits recall anthropological photographs. Reminiscent o f
German artist Gerhard Richter's blurred photo-paintings, Huy adopts this antidecorative device to critique an aestheticised Vietnamese art that plays to foreign as
well as urban Vietnamese appetites for exotic/outsider imagery. With these canvase
Huy brings national ethnic homogeneity -problematic as discussed above- and the
subjective nature o f the exotic to the fore. If the Vietnamese are stereotypically
exotic for Westerners, then minority women in full dress are in turn exotic subjects
for Vietnam’s globalised city-dwellers. These works use their pseudo-anthropological
genre to ride a fine conceptual line between empathetic portraiture, documentation,
and a self-indulgent, voyeuristic majority fascination with minority life. Riding a
nostalgia-infused longing for a village past that only prosperous young Vietnamese
urbanites with no direct memory o f rural hardship could muster, these paintings speak
too o f the growing rift between urban and rural cultures in Vietnam today.
With his 2003 The man makes rain Bui Cong Khanh also exploits Vietnam ’s
indigenous rural icons to dissect contemporary society’s rejection o f traditional

forms. Made in Hoian and Berlin, this two-screen video shows the artist and his
older friend Thanh Long, an unemployed folk actor-become-farmer- portrayed
applying folk perform ers’ make-up. Thanh Long is out o f a jo b because his small
theatrical company has died due to television replacing traditional entertainment.
The video's slow pace contributing to its pathos, the footage offers an allegory of
the effects o f time and cultural erosion that is a reality in Vietnam and much of
developing Southeast Asia. Opposing age to youth, tradition to modernity, and
permanence

to

impermanence,

its action

culminates

with

the

rain-induced

disappearance o f Bui Cons, K hanh’s makeup, while his older counterpart retains his
face-paint despite the rain. The piece conveys a message o f empowerment, cultural
2 00


CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE.

and personal history prevailing over obsolescence. Steering clear o f nostalgia or
sentimentality, the work queries progress’ consequences, evoking the loss
underlying all cultural mutation.
Borrowing fo reig n motifs fo r communicating locally-relevant ideas
Vu Dan Tan is interested in home culture, but avoids the rice-bowl-andconical-hat identity-trope(50). Mining a culturally inclusive iconographic repertoire,
he frequently quotes from world sources and global current-events. most famously
Europe's 1999 adoption o f the Euro single-currency(51) to fit the Vietnamese
context. Tan, bom into an intellectual milieu, possessed as thorough knowledge o f
Western art as Asian, his education conforming to the European cosmopolitan ethos
o f modernizing Vietnam outlined earlier. Grounded in Western classical music,
well-read in the European literary classics, and fluent in several European
languages, the artist navigated seamlessly from one set o f cultural references to
another, inventing a wholly personal expression that rooted in Vietnam, speaks to a
universal audience.
Napoleon, one o f the leading figures o f V u's trans-cultural pantheon, appears
throughout his work o f the last decade as his alter-ego, self-portraits o f the artist-asBonaparte providing clues to his relationship with his own identity and Vietnam
beyond. Titled Self-Proud-Portraits (mocking art world narcissism), these effigies
o f Tan as the diminutive French general point to his ongoing interrogation o f the
meaning o f individualism and the contradictions between exterior image and inner
truth, pressing issues in today's Vietnam. Camping him self with irony in the cloak
and hat o f the great but tragic Corsican, Tan retreats from society while remaining
at its core, like Nguyen Van Cuong both participant in, and voyeur o f the national
cultural drama.
Encounters with culture outside Vietnam- or H anoi's visual art vanguard o f
the 1990s: the cultivation o f home seeds
In the aftermath o f economic liberalisation, from the early to middle-1990s,
the Hanoi art world became a forum for experimentation. The extent o f outsider
influence on this artistic blossoming is debatable. The most visible foreigners
penetrating the art scene during this period were Eric Leroux, Bradford Edwards,
Veronika Radulovic, and Brian Ring. Yet independently o f the ideas brought by

non-Vietnamese, the artistic terrain was by then seemingly ripe for change, arguably
presenting; seeds o f the new art that bloomed later. For even before doi moi, Hanoi’s
cultural landscape was permeable, information and images making their way in. Vu
Dan Tan, a generation older than the others today acknowledged with him as the

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VIỆT NAM HỌC - KỶ YÉU HỘI THẢO QUÓC TÉ LẦN THÚ TU

Hanoi vanguard (including N suyen Minh Thanh, N guyen Van Cuong, Nguyen
Quang Huy, Truone Tan), was already making contemporary art when international
curators began conversing on the Vietnamese capital.
Amongst others, Veronika Radulovic, the German artist, curator, and educator,
who lectured at the Hanoi University o f Fine Arts from 1994 to 2005, is central to
the story o f early contemporary art in Hanoi. That she provided her students access,
through images, conversation, and demonstration (she is a working artist), to current
Western art is undeniable. But analysing the early and later work o f the Hanoi
University o f Fine Arts students she nurtured, it is also apparent that individuality,
fresh outlooks, ties with home-culture, and real talent are already present, the
kernels o f later excellence discernible. Committed teachers, particularly when they
befriend and mentor their students as Radulovic did, are influential on personal
levels in the development of their charges. But this is true everywhere and should
not be confused with larger and more significant forms o f extraneous cultural
influence.
The birth o f Salon Natasha in 1990, early-on a meeting-place for artists and
intellectuals, later also a vanguard exhibition space curated by its founder, furthered
the confidence o f a new generation o f visual practitioners. Via the Salon, these
artists participated in exhibitions in Europe, Australia and North America, triennales
and other international, non-commercial manifestations helping them cement their

reputation and career.
As much as foreign ideas infiltrating home soil, travel outside Vietnam
contributed to b r o a d e n i n g the horizons o f local practitioners. As stated above, by
the middle 1990s, a small emerging clique contemporary artists was joining
overseas exhibitions. This was made easier from 1997 when exit permissions for
Vietnamese citizens were no longer required (52). This group, exposed to nonVietnamese culture -in this pre-internet period still unfamiliar-, quite naturally
returned home with innovative thoughts regarding art-making. However, it should
be stressed that in many ways these trips abroad, as much as providing new
stimulation, boosted artists’ confidence in the validity o f their own locallydeveloped art.
Yet

Vietnamese

artists’ inclusion

in

international

art

exhibitions

and

competitions from the 1990s poses its own dilemmas. As Natalia Kraevskaia
outlines in her 2003 essay ‘Philip Morris Damages Your Health', these gatherings,
which were meant as routes to cultural exchange designed to encourage artists’
exploration o f new standards and directions, though designed by curators, often
tempted artists to follow art fashion, or pander to critics and the market. But if

202


CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE.

Vietnamese creatives’ encounter with market pressures at the end o f the 1990s was
unexpectedly sudden and arguably detrimental to some, artists’ everywhere are
subjected to similar forces, in the developed world as in the emerging. Moreover, if
the Hanoi expressive forum suffered from art’s abrupt commodification at the turn
o f the century, then some artists o f integrity simply reacted, renounced, and
departed, the cleft between mainstream and experimental spheres appearino in
Hanoi as it had surfaced in so many places elsewhere and before.
Perhaps the earliest elobe-trottine, Vietnamese contemporary artist was Vu
Dan Tan, who already in the early 1970s(53) wandered as far as China, the then
Soviet Union, and Cuba. Vu Dan Tan, as previously stated an early proponent of
what is now understood as Vietnamese contemporary art(54), would by the middle
1990s be identified as a habitue o f the nascent Asian/Southeast Asian institutional
exhibition circuit.
Travel, albeit an important conduit o f information, especially pre-internet, was
only one o f various means o f access to outside culture. Sophisticated idea-play
through cultural juxtaposition is amongst the most obvious defining features of Vu
Dan Tan’s art, all sources scoured for material, the conceptual mostly developed
from the formal. In Vietnam, as we note above, village ethos, minority traditions,
and mythology are sources for Tan, cut-out cigarette and film boxes encoded with
local meaning; Hanoi street life is recalled through glass-lidded boxes; home-brand
consumables, with hybrid origins in domestic- colonial links appear; Chinese
painting convention infiltrates Tan’s art through the printed ‘chop’ depicting the
artist’s own face, figuring sometimes as his only signature, Ming-literati style;
T an’s mock calligraphy o f the early 1980s irreverently referencing ink convention,
also points to Chinese painting tradition. Tan as frequently appropriates from nonVietnamese sources as from the local, but does not build his art through a ‘them and

us prism’, his countrym en’s culture on one side, outsider values on the other.
Instead, both Hanoian and citizen o f the world, Vu Dan Tan, the quintessential
Vietnamese borrower, makes art that reverberating with cultural associations o f all
sorts, translates human encounters and concerns beyond national boundaries.
On the material front, some have suggested that Vu Dan T an ’s emblematic use
o f discarded packaging references Italian Arte Povera, or other mid-century
European currents. But as has been argued elsewhere(55), V u’s choice o f material,
as is the case with many o f the artists featured in this paper, stems purely from
Vietnamese realities and personal predilection. The multi-media artist is a luminary
o f the period not because he dares to subvert detritus, but because he enlists this
subversion to speak up about ideas, some o f which the most socially, politically and
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VIỆT NAM HỌC - KỶ YÉU HỘI THẢO QUÓC TẾ LẦN TH Ứ T ư

philosophically critical o f the period. It is precisely because Vu Dan Tan commands
such a plural repertoire o f signs and formal devices that he so ably translates
Vietnam o f the day.
As the world gets smaller due to ever vaster and more efficient communication
networks, the homogenization o f the ‘local’ preoccupies many on all continents. In
Southeast Asia, and more specifically Vietnam, the continuing porosity o f visual
culture, though possibly perceived as a threat, in the context o f thousands o f years
o f absorption, evolution, and renewal, must surely be seen as opportunity, the local
permeated but not necessarily diluted by influences o f all kinds. As regional and
Vietnamese contemporary art's histories begin to be written, commentators can look
first to visual practices, that o f their place and time, connect forcefully outward with
the world beyond.
Back and forth quotation and exchange in art, in Asia as elsewhere, are not
post-modern innovations. Indeed, in Vietnam, as in Southeast Asia, the language o f

art is based not on one-off genres, media, and forms from Western tradition, but on
fluidity and concept-play involving continuous reception-and-transformation. The
potentiality o f future reception o f ideas is deeply rooted in the culture. The essential
question in Vietnam is not whether artists borrow, but rather what they do and say
with their borrowings. Vietnam 's best visual practitioners o f recent decades
brilliantly show that a mastery o f the hybrid, ingrained in home expression, is vital

to the product ion o f leading contem porary art.
Notes
1. Regina Krahl, Chinese Ceramics from the Meiyintang Collection, V.2, Azimuth
Editions, London, 1994 p. 11; Also Jennifer Chiang Han Hua, ‘Crossing Culture in the
Blue-and-white with Arabic or Persian inscription under Emperor Zhengde’, paper
submitted for ‘Crossing Cultures: China and the Outside World', University of Hong
Kong, School of Humanities Department of Fine Arts, 2007.
2. William Rubin ed., "Primitivism" in 20th century Art- Affinity o f the Tribal and
the Modern, MOMA, New York, 1984, pp. 18-19
3. Ibid K rahl, pp. 107, 216 on Q ing D ynasty porcelain revivalism s and quotations o f

archaic bronze forms and Song wares.
4. Wang-Go Weng, Chinese Painting and Calligraphy A Pictorial Survey, Dover
Publications, New York, 1978, p. XVII, on 5th century Chinese theorist Hsieh Ho's
remarks about transmission of tradition in painting through copying older works.
5. On cultural authenticity confronted to outside influence, Pel chat amendment to
the 1994 Broadcasting Reform Act on foreign radio content in France, David
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CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE.

Looseley, Popular Music in Contemporary France: Authenticity, Politics, Debate, Berg

Publishers, Oxford, 2003.
6. Nguyễn Văn Huyên. The Ancient Civilization o f Vietnam, The Gioi Publishers,
Hanoi, 2002, p.299
7. Lê Thanh Đức, Đình Làng Mien Bac-The Village Dinh in Northern Vietnam, Fine
Arts Publishing house, Hanoi, 2001
8. Malay concepts of communal space, Evers HD, Korff Rudiger eds., ‘The Cultural
Construction of Malay Cities’, Southeast Asian Urbanism, The Meaning and Power o f the
Social Space, ISEAS, Singapore, 2000, pp. 108-109 and p. 111
9. Nguyen Quan, 'A turning point for Vietnam’s contemporary sculpture', ''Không
Gian M ới”. Điêu Khắc Đương Đại Việt Nam ("New Space" Vietnamese Contemporary
Sculpture), exhibition catalogue, HàNội, 1999
10. Nora Taylor, 'Framing the National Spirit. Viewing and Reviewing painting
under the revolution', The Country o f M emory: rem aking the Past in Late Socialist

Vietnam, ed. Hue-Tam and Ho Tai, University of California press, LA, London, 2001,
pp. 116-117
11. Annete Van Der Bosch, 'New Directions in Vietnamese Contemporary Art: Le
Thua Tien, Nguyen Thanh Son and Dang Anh Tuan', Essays on Modern and
Contemporary Vietnamese Art, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2009, pp. 158-161
12. Stevenson, Guy, Krahl et al., Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition, Art
Media Resources, Ltd, Chicago, 1997
13. Ann Proctor, 'Back to the future: the emergence of installation art in Vietnam',
Essays on Modern and Contemporary Vietnamese Art, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore,
2009, p . 168
14. Ann Proctor, Out o f the Mould. Contemporary Ceramic Sculpture in Vietnam,
VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, Germany, 2009, 203 p.
15. lola Lenzi, ‘Negotiating Home, History and Nation’, exhibition catalogue
Negotiating Home, History and Nation: two decades o f contemporary art in Southeast Asia
1991-2011, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2011, pp. 18-20 on contemporary
Vietnamese and Southeast Asian artists’ selection of porcelain/other ‘low’ media, to

support concept.
16. Ian Howard, 'Vietnamese artists: Making Do, Digging in, Breaking Out',
exhibition catalogue, 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial o f Contemporary Art, Queensland Art
Gallery, Brisbane, 1996, p. 49.
17. Boi Tran Huynh, Vietnamese Aesthetics From 1925 Onwards, Degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in Visual Arts Thesis, Sydney College of the Arts, The University of
Sydney, 2005, pp. 8-9
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VIỆT NAM HỌC - KỶ YÉU HỘI THẢO QUÓC TẾ LÀN T H Ứ T Ư

18. John DeFrancis, Colonialism and Language Policy in Viet Nam, The Hague.
Mouton, 1977, p.30
19. Pamela Pears, Remnants o f Empire in Algeria in Vietnam: Women, Words, and
War, Lexington Books, 2006, p. 18.
20. Shih Virginia Jing-yi, Oiioc Ngu Revolution: A Weapon o f Nationalism in
Vietnam, 1991
21. Wynn Wilcox, Women, Westernization and the Origins of Modern Vietnamese
Theatre, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 37 (2), pp. 205-224, June 2006. NUS, p. 205
22. Peter Zinoman, Vũ Trọng Phung's Dumb Luck and the Nature of Vietnamese
Modernism, In Introduction to: Dumb Luck. A Novel by Vũ Trọng Phụng. Ed. Peter
Zinoman, University of Michigan press, Ann Arbor, 2002, pp. 9-10
23. Neil Jam ieson, U nderstanding Vietnam , U niversity o f C alifornia Press, 1995,

pp. 1-2
24. ibid Boi Tran Huynh, pp. 71-73
25. ibid Boi Tran Huynh, p. 120
26. ibid Boi Tran Huynh pp. 118 - 119; Nadine Andre-Palois, 'The Ecole des Beaux Arts de l'lndochine. A Striking Shift in Vietnamese Art', Essays on Modern and
Contemporary Vietnamese Art, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2009, pp. 9-10

27. Les Laques du Vietnam, Fine Arts Publishing House, Hanoi, 1994.
28. Nora Taylor, Painters in Hanoi. An Ethnography o f Vietnamese Art, University
of Hawai'i Press, 2004, p. 23
29. Christine Noppe, Jean-Franẹois Hubert, Art o f Vietnam, Parkstone Press Ltd.,
New York, 2003, p. 183
30. Iola Lenzi, Museums o f Southeast Asia, Thames & Hudson, 2005, p. 9
31. ibid Taylor, Painters in Hanoi, p. 53
32. ibid Boi Tran Huynh, p. 169
33. Iola Lenzi, ‘Of Emperors, soldiers and poetry- the recent painting of Ha Manh
Thang’, Not Memory, Bui Gallery, Hanoi, 2010, unpublished
34. Veronika Radulovic, 'Anything Can Happen between Now and Then....', Essays
on Modern and Contemporary Vietnamese Art, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2009,
pp. 193-194. Ashley Carruthers, ‘In Search of Dissidence - 9 Lives as Casula Powerhouse’,
ARTAsiaPacific, issue 28, 2000, p. 42 on the opacity of dissident Vietnamese artists’ socio­
political objectives.

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CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN VIETNAMESE.

35. Of 1998. interviews with the author, Hanoi 2010-2012; Natalia
Kraevskaia, ‘From Artifice toward Honesty’, exhibition catalogue Vietnam Art Actuel,
Universite de Montreal, Montreal. 2002, p. 11
36. ibid Lenzi, ‘Home, History and Nation’, p. 19 on Cuong’s interest in porcelain as
a medium and its domestic, traditional connotations.
37. Iola Lenzi, ‘Venus in Vietnam’, Venus in Vietnam Vu Dan Tan & Nguyen Nghici
Cuong, exhibition catalogue, Goethe Institut, Hanoi, 2012, pp.28-29 Nghia Cuong's
Beauties High Quality series 2008-2012
38. John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Craftsman House, G+B Arts International,

Sydney, 1998, p.253 for woman as symbol of nation; Iola Lenzi, ‘ NO HARD LINES
gender politics in contemporary Southeast Asian art: does a women’s vernacular exist?’,
Temporary Insanity-Pinaree Sanpitak, The Art Center at the Jim Thompson House,
Bangkok, 2004, pp. 21-31.
39. lola Lenzi, ‘Heroes and promise: intersecting currents in new art from VietNam’,
Intersection Vietnam- new works from North a n d South, exhibition catalogue, V W F A

Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, 2009, pp. 1-7
40. ibid Lenzi, ‘Heroes and promise’.
41. Sound, performance, rubbish, a vintage car and more have been used by Vu Dan Tan.
42. ibid Taylor, Painters in Hanoi, p. 73.
43. Interviews with the author in Hanoi, March 2001.
44. Iola Lenzi, ‘Urbane Subversion: Empowerment, defiance and sexuality in the art
of Vu Dan Tan’, 12 Contemporary Artists o f Vietnam, The Gioi Publishers, Hanoi, 2010,
pp. 16-24 for meanings of Vu Dan Tan’s use of detritus and craft material.
45. Interviews with the artist in Hanoi 2000-2001; ibid Lenzi ‘Urbane Subversion5
for Tan’s solidarity with craftspeople, his conception of the function of art, and conceptual
approach.
46. Interviews in Hanoi, 2000
47. ibid Lenzi ‘Urbane Subversion’.
48. It is common for Southeast Asian artists to adopt simultaneous insider-outsider
perspectives, Sutee Kunavichayanont, Michael Shaowanasai in Thailand, Mella Jaarsma,
Nindityo Adipurnomo, Krisna Murti, Arahmaiani in Indonesia, amongst many
49. Iola Lenzi, ‘Seductive Amazons and Liberated Icons’”, exhibition catalogue,
Recent work by Vu Dan Tan and Nguyen Ouang Huy, Atelier Frank & Lee, Singapore,
2001, pp. 7-11 for Nguyen Quang Huy’s deconstruction of Vietnamese cultural icons and
use of the woman totem.
207