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| The lovely Sophie at Frontline Gallery |
Yesterday Jessica and I
took part in
Sophie’s Art Tour of Ho Chi Minh City, visiting five of the city’s
galleries to explore how the Vietnamese art world has developed and augmented
through the recent periods of colonialism, war, independence and globalisation.
We met in a café in the city centre in the morning, where we drank and iced
coffees and heard an introduction to the tour by our guide, Sophie Hughes.
Sophie has worked in the arts in Ho Chi Minh City for three years and began her
tour as a way of providing the information about Vietnamese art history that is
neglected in the city’s museums. She is a lovely young woman- fun,
knowledgeable and friendly.
There were to be four
sections of the tour: the colonial period and the development of Vietnamese art
under French influence, the two Indochina wars, covering the documentary work
of combat artists and propaganda artwork, the pre- and post- reunification
period and its effect on the lives and works of artists, and finally, the
post-Doi Moi (open door) period and the subsequent development of modern,
abstract and commercial Vietnamese art.
Sophie began with a
background to French presence in Indochina. An effective element of her tour
was the use of an iPad to show the group photographs and artwork to
accompany her explanations; the images she used were well-chosen to provide
context and background. One of such images was a poster for the Exposition
Coloniale of 1931 in Paris (right), which Sophie used to demonstrate the
influence that l’Indochine had on French culture during this period, from
fashion to architecture. The poster is aesthetic but inaccurate as the
‘Indochinese’ man in the image, wearing a conical hat, looks black rather than
Asian.
In 1651, the French
Jesuit scholar Alexandre de Rhodes introduced a Romanised version of the
Vietnamese language to a country with very low literacy rates as the established
written language, Nom, which used adapted Chinese characters, was incredibly
difficult to learn. In 1860, Romanised Vietnamese was introduced to French-run
schools, sparking a boom in literacy rates and the development of the educated,
intellectual class. From here onwards, the development of modern Vietnamese
thought and a turn away from traditional Confucian ideas can be marked. This
was significant for the development of the arts and politics.
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| A portrait of Duc Minh |
The first gallery we
visited was the Duc Minh Gallery on Duong Le Quy Don. This is a commercial
gallery with a private collection that belonged to Mr Duc Minh, an art
collector who managed to hold on to his 1,000 or so works throughout the
communist takeover period. He had offered his collection to the National Museum
in Hanoi on his death in 1983, on the condition that the collection be held
under his name. The museum refused this request and so his collection remains
in Saigon. This private gallery offers a selection of the works. Many of the
works in this gallery came from students of the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts
de l'Indochine, established in Hanoi in 1925 by Victor Tardieu and Nam Son. The
school taught artistic disciplines such linear perspective and anatomy, and
introduced oil painting to Vietnam. Surprisingly, it was also this school that
introduced lacquer as an art form. Lacquer, made from the dried sap of the
Asian sumac tree, has long been used in religious decoration in Vietnam, but it
was a French teacher of the art school, Joseph Inguimberty, who first
encouraged the use of lacquer for art, which can be adorned with crushed
eggshell, mother-of-pearl and gold leaf to create distinctive artwork. It was
here that Nguyen Gia Tri, Vietnam’s most celebrated lacquer artist, was
trained.
Sophie demonstrated how
impressionist depictions of light and movement on water could be seen in a
painting of wooden sampans on a river- a distinctly Vietnamese subject, and
explained the controversy of To Ngoc Van’s Girl with Lilies (1943) in depicting
a beautiful, rosy-cheeked young girl posing beside a large, open flower:
provocative, sensual and challenging to perceived ideas about the function of
depicting women in artwork.
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| Girl with Lilies by To Ngoc Van (1943) |
In 1945 Ho Chi Minh
declared the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Ba Dinh
square, Hanoi. Many artists followed him in the Viet Minh resistance movement
and relocated to the hills in the North-West of Vietnam. Eight years of
fighting ensued as the French attempted the regain control of Vietnam following
the end of the Second World War. In 1954, the French surrendered after being
overwhelmed at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. In an attempt to prevent all of
Vietnam ‘falling’ to communism, the international community decreed at the
Geneva Convention to split Vietnam at the 17th parallel of latitude,
with a communist, Russian-supported North and a capitalist, US-supported South.
The USA installed Catholic and anti-communist Ngo Dinh Diem to preside over
South Vietnam through a fraudulent plebiscite in 1955. Diem’s lack of popular
support and the widespread corruption within the South Vietnamese government
led to the state digressing into a military one. American troops were sent to
monitor the situation and to aid the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) in opposing
resistance groups, the roots of the two decade long American War.
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| Richard compares an original to its reproduction |
We looked at the work
produced by combat artists who documented both wars from the frontlines, and
the propaganda art that was produced during the period. The two were often
interlinked. Firstly, we visited Frontline Gallery in the home of Richard di
San Marzano and his wife. Richard is the curator of the
Dogma Collection, the
world’s largest collection of propaganda posters. We visited the
Dogma Gallery and Shop later in the day. The artworks in Frontline gallery were mostly
reproductions of canvas and paper paintings and sketches produced by combat
artists. Sophie explained that as 60% of combat artists were killed in the
battlefields, those who survived were reluctant to let go of pieces of art that
were very meaningful to them, testaments to the experiences they lived through.
Reproductions were seen as a solution to this difficulty- allowing artists to
keep their original artwork while displaying copies for the public to
appreciate. Many of the artists on the frontline met former students of the
French art school in Hanoi, some of whom would set up workshops or exhibitions
in the jungle. In this way, French art lessons were passed between young
Vietnamese artists in the midst of the resistance fight against the French,
Sophie neatly observed. She pointed to a sketch of a group of soldiers by
Nguyen Duc Tho that uses a composition technique typical of the Italian
Renaissance, whereby the composition is formed in a spiral shape to draw the
eye to the centre of the image, replicating natural forms such as shells,
flowers and fossils.
The images in Richard’s
gallery weren’t masterpieces- most were produced very quickly due to the dangerous
environment- but they were very interesting and important historical documents
of the lives of soldiers and civilians at the forefront of the war. Huynh
Phuong Dong’s Decorated Hero, Nguyen Van Dung (1963) (right) shows the bravery
of both the subject and artist in facing oncoming South Vietnamese tanks and US
helicopters in a battle. Another value of the work of combat artists was the
therapeutic effect on soldiers of sitting for portraits. In the dehumanising
environment of war, soldiers greatly valued this care and attention and would
treasure the images produced by the artist. Indeed, artists were highly valued
within the military. It was interesting to note that several of the works on
display featured children; Sophie reminded us that the war permeated everyday
life for much of the Vietnamese population. Civilians were often armed and
would occasionally shoot down US planes!
We went on to the
Dogma Gallery and Shop at 43 Ton That Thiep, where we saw a sample of propaganda
posters produced during the war and afterwards, in the rebuilding of the reunified
nation. In fact, socialist realist-style propaganda remains the preferred
method of public communication by the People’s Committee, as can be seen by
looking at government posters across Ho Chi Minh City. Sophie explained that
Vietnamese propaganda art is unique from Chinese and Russian counterparts as
the images are individualised, the wording is poetic and works are often
signed. They were often naive in style as they were produced by untrained artists. Many feature distinctive iconography such as the lotus, the national
flower, and images of ethnic minority people, who helped liberation soldiers
from the lowlands by showing them how to find water and avoid disease in the
jungle highlands. It is also worth visiting the great little souvenir shop on
the ground floor which sells mugs, magnets and notebooks based on propaganda images.
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| 'The most beautiful flower is the lotus; the finest name is Uncle Ho'- from the Dogma collection online |
At the
Fine Arts Museum
we compared artworks of the pre- and post-reunification periods and saw work
from Southern artists for the first time. In the wartime period art flourished
in Saigon, where there was relative peace and
the fashion and rock n’ roll culture of the swinging sixties took hold. Sophie showed us around some of the
work and pointed out how European art had influenced the work of Vietnamese
artists, albeit with a significant time lapse. When the North Vietnamese Army
and National Liberation Front forces captured Saigon in April 1975 and
reunified the north and south under a communist government, many artists fled
the country and abandoned their work to escape persecution. Therefore the
collection at the Fine Arts Museum is rare and valuable.
The new communist
government, primarily made up of Northerners, appreciated the importance of
artists but were careful to rigidly refocus and regulate their work. Artists
were sent to ports, railway lines and factories to document the reconstruction
of country in a celebratory nature (although the government ceased to send
artists to ports when so many of them went missing). They would also be
subjected to eight-hour lectures on Marxism and Vietnamese culture by Ho Chi
Minh’s right-hand man, Trung Chin. Art was stifled into uniform, socialist
realist propaganda pieces. In 1975, a Northerner named Nguyen Kao Thuong became
the headmaster of the Saigon Fine Arts University. He set about destroying all
nude sculptures in the buildings and redirected the school to only produce
government-approved artwork.
Where the Vietnamese art
scene came into its own was following the Doi Moi, or open doors policy, of
1986, when the government opened up enterprise and foreign investment to the
country in order to kick-start its shattered economy. Foreigners and returning
Vietnamese informed the new art scene; investment allowed artists to experiment
with expensive mediums such as sculpture. The two prevailing streams at the
time were that of abstract art as an expression of the excitement of new-found
freedom, and a nostalgic return to the romanticised imagery of the ‘old
Indochina’. In 1990, the first commercial gallery was opened on Dong Khoi and
many more followed. Unfortunately, many of these were exploitative of artists
who were desperate to make some money for the first time in decades. With this
boom, artists, previously a highly respected but impoverished class, could
become incredibly rich by producing commercial, popularised art. Sophie gave us
the example of a hugely popular Saigon-based artist named Nguyen Thanh Binh. He
began producing very beautiful and simple paintings of Vietnamese girls wearing
white ao-dais carrying lotuses or ballet-dancing, which have become incredibly
popular in Vietnam. On a trip to the UK, he was taken to Cambridge and was so
besotted with the town that he vowed his children would study at Cambridge
University. Returning to Vietnam, he continued to produce artwork following the
popular trend, often very repetitively, in order to fund his dream. Sure
enough, both of his children went to British universities (although Newcastle
and Hull, not quite Cambridge) and Binh was satisfied. When asked about his
work, however, he feels that he is merely producing a popular product, not art.
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| One of Nguyen Thanh Binh's works |
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| Me outside San Art |
In the final chapter of
our story, we visited
San Art, an artist-run exhibition space and reading room
in Binh Thanh district since 2007. Such places are very important to the
Vietnamese art scene in filling the gap left in the rigid teaching of art in
state education. Apparently, foreign teachers in Vietnamese government schools are
not permitted to teach art theory or critique to students, only the technical
aspects. It takes independent galleries and projects such as this one to
provide the diverse study and access to information that young Vietnamese
artists may miss out on. San Art recently hosted Vietnam’s first artist-in-residence
project over a six-month period, the results of which we went to see.
I learned from this tour
that there is more to Vietnamese art than the approved socialist realist pieces
of the Fine Arts Museum and the replicas of Van Goch and Klimpt in the Dong
Khoi commercial galleries. Hidden in residential streets behind wrought-iron
gates are private collections that mark the most interesting cultural moments
of 20th and 21st century Vietnamese history. Sophie’s
tour was successful in putting the pieces together of a dramatically changing
art history. But at 950,000 dong (almost £30) a pop, it is very dear. With the
Fine Arts Museum providing very little information for visitors, and
considering the lack of government funding for the and the censored education
system, it seems that, sadly, for a real art education, students, tourists and
Vietnamese alike must turn to the private sector.
