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BACK[ART] Vietnamese paintings (including a gay artist, Truong Tan)
Time article was pulled from Time webpage.
TIME International
August 26, 1996 Volume 148, No. 9
SIMPLE PLEASURES
THEIR INFLUENCES ARE WAR, POVERTY AND FRANCE, BUT VIETNAM'S ARTISTS ARE
PROSPERING IN UNEXPECTED WAYS
TIM LARIMER/HANOI
A prizewinning painting at a recent Hanoi exhibition appears to be exactly
what one might expect from an artist in Vietnam. A splotch of red divides
clusters of war implements covered by dirt: guns, fighter jets, knives and
barbed wire. A statement about Vietnam's history of warfare and bloodshed?
Not exactly. "We suffer a lot of sorrow and pain, and now we don't want to
remember that time," says the artist, Do Minh Tam, 33. His inspiration comes
not from B-52s, napalm and helicopters swirling above paddy fields--the
indelible images from the war fought in the 1960s--but from shops selling
toy guns and planes in the economically vibrant Hanoi of the late 1990s.
"A little boy shot me with a water pistol, and at first I thought it was
just a simple game," says Tam. "But then I think: that game can lead a child
to become violent in the future." So his painting, Fossils of Violence, is
actually an expression of hope that in the future the toys of war will be
buried deep beneath the earth's surface--hence the dirt.
Vietnam's artists were themselves hidden away from the rest of the world for
years. But as the country's Communist leaders have reformed the economy and
opened--haltingly--to outside influences, Vietnamese artists are making a
splash on the international art scene. They were among the first of their
countrymen allowed to mingle with foreigners during the early days of
Hanoi's version of glasnost; today they are among the first beneficiaries of
market economics. Works by Bui Xuan Phai, who died in 1988, sold for as
little as $100 five years ago; now they command thousands of dollars. A
collector in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) sold his first Phai to a
foreigner in 1992 for $2,000; he used the money to buy 20 more paintings by
the artist for $100 each. Last month he sold one of those to a South Korean
collector for $36,000.
That's pocket change in the galleries of New York, London and Paris, but in
a country like Vietnam, with an annual per capita income of $240, it's a
fortune. Living artists are cashing in too. Le Thiet Cuong, 34, whose
university art instructors refused to give him paint because they detested
his minimalist style, has sold works for as much as $40,000. "Two things
happen now," says Cuong. "We can paint freely. And we can sell what we
paint."
The urban centers of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City bustle with something of an
art Renaissance: a rebirth of dollars as well as style. "People see artists
like Cuong earn a lot of money, so everybody decides to become a painter,"
says Bich Ha, a Ho Chi Minh City gallery owner. In at least one case a
gallery proprietor did away with the middle man--the artist--and took up
painting herself, thus keeping all the profits.
So lucrative has the country's art market become that there is a burgeoning
trade in forgeries. Nguyen Tu Nghiem, one of the country's most revered
artists, says his wife spotted an alleged "Nghiem" for sale at a gallery
down the street from his house. "The price was $1,000," says the wife Nguyen
Thu Giang. "Everyone knows that is too little for a Nghiem." Says the
artist, who is 74: "And the painting was horrible! I am an old man. And I am
very tired of having to look at paintings people buy to see if they are
really mine. I wish these terrible people would stop copying me!"
How did a country as poor and war-ravaged as Vietnam develop such a vibrant
art scene? "Part of it is a fad, in the same way that when the Soviet Union
opened up, Soviet art became a fad," says C. David Thomas, director of the
Indochina Arts Project, who has organized exhibitions of Vietnamese art in
the U.S. As Vietnam welcomed foreign investors, it was inevitable that
foreign curators, critics and collectors, forever on the lookout for the
next big trend, would follow. And many of the country's artists are proving
to be no less profit-minded than other Vietnamese. "I worry that the
temptations to make money are so great that artists are beginning to
mass-produce," says Toh Hock Ghim, Singapore's envoy to Hanoi and an
enthusiastic art collector. "In the end that will kill interest in
Vietnamese art."
But Thomas believes the art will sustain its appeal because of a unique
style that results from the twin influences of its Asian traditions and its
colonization by Europeans: "It is a wonderful combination of the mystery of
Eastern art and the familiarity of Western art." Vietnamese painting owes
much to the influence of the French, who in 1925 opened the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine in Hanoi. The institution trained a revolutionary
vanguard of urban-minded artists until it was forced to close down during
the 1945 Japanese invasion against the French. Many of these artists
struggled to find their own voice as they mastered foreign technique.
Nghiem, for instance, successfully fused traditional art--carvings from
village pagodas, woodblock prints, folk dancers, animals of the lunar
calendar--with Western-style painting.
Nghiem's influence over later generations of artists is evident. Dang Xuan
Hoa, 37, paints in a style reminiscent of Matisse, but he uses such symbols
as teacups and folktales, like one about a fish turning into a dragon. "It
might appear to be like a Western painting to a foreigner, but a Vietnamese
person can see it is Vietnamese," says Hoa, who works in Hanoi.
This struggle for a national identity has recently been revived. Painters
like Hoa, who says he at first abandoned traditional Vietnamese imagery, are
mining their cultural roots. Some young painters even insist on using giay
do, Vietnamese paper made from the jute plant. The government's Ministry of
Culture and Information, which oversees the arts, is trying to encourage
what it calls the "national spirit" with awards and exhibitions for
compliant painters and a vigorous propaganda campaign attacking rebellious
artists.
That is not a popular policy among Vietnam's more independent-minded
artists. "It is stupid," says Tran Luong, 37. He produces abstract
underwater scenes that on the surface appear to derive little from
traditional imagery; yet his paintings were inspired by ponds he explored as
a child when his family was evacuated to the countryside to escape the
American bombing of Hanoi--a shared experience of northern Vietnamese of his
generation. One of the country's most respected painters, Tran Luu Hau, 68,
scoffs at the notion of a Vietnamese style. In recent years he has abandoned
traditional themes in favor of more abstract work. "When I paint, I am not
concerned about national characteristics or identities," he says. "My soul
is Vietnamese." Even Nghiem, the role model of many traditional artists, is
wary of a cultural mandate. Says he: "Real Vietnamese art is when you find
your own style."
It is perhaps easier, then, to describe what Vietnamese art is not than to
explain what it is. Just as Tam's treatise on violence is not about the
Vietnam War, neither do his contemporaries bother much with that fractured
period that conjures up such potent images. Given the country's long
struggle for independence, the conspicuous aversion to this theme often
surprises foreigners. Like Tam, many artists say they are simply tired of
the war imagery.
Missing as well is anything even vaguely political, with a few exceptions.
In part this omission must be attributed to an atmosphere in which artists'
paintbrushes have only lately been unfettered from the shackles of
government control. Ho Chi Minh in 1945 called for art to depict "the
reality of our everyday life." That edict was strictly interpreted for
nearly four decades to mean supporting the national cause, be it winning a
war or increasing rice production.
Ho did not necessarily watch over the easels of artists to see what they
painted. But in a poor country the government was the sole supplier of
paints and canvas. Those who refused to toe the party line were not allowed
to exhibit their work. Phai, for instance, was shunned by the authorities
and as a result painted on matchbox covers, cigarette boxes and old
newspapers. The government that once made him a pariah celebrates him today
as an upholder of the Vietnamese spirit. "Freedom to paint what we want is
still something new," says Duong Tuong, a writer and critic.
Understandably, caution is a survival skill common among Vietnamese artists.
"Those who remember the times when they weren't able to paint what they
wanted fear that the repression will come back," says Judith Day, proprietor
of a Hong Kong gallery that specializes in Vietnamese art. The artists seem
intent on presenting an idealized vision of life, with all the hard edges
blunted--even at a time of profound social and economic transformation. It
is as if they are immune to the tempestuous world swirling all around them.
"This is the shortcoming of today's art," says Tuong. "There is tension in
society, but it is not reflected in the work of the artists."
"Maybe because they had those controls before," he says, "they want to vent
what was restrained for such a long time." That turns out to be not burning
political expression but something more benign: flowers, nudes, country
pastorals and traditional folklore. "It's a romantic and idealized view of
life," says Birgit Hussfeld, a German critic who writes about Vietnamese
art. "But it is boring and repetitious."
Vietnam's most adventuresome painter today is certainly Truong Tan, 34,
whose bold celebrations of his homosexuality have rattled traditionalists.
Government censors forced a gallery to take down some of his paintings,
which included graphic depictions of men having sex with other men. Artists
who want to exhibit overseas must have their works approved by the Ministry
of Culture and Information; Tan is apparently the only painter who has been
denied. His fellow artists are remarkably unsympathetic. Says one: "The
government is right. He should not paint such bad things." Criticism like
this only emboldens Tan, who says, "I want to shock people because that is
what art should do."
It no doubt worries the culture bureaucrats that younger artists are
encouraged by Tan. "Truong Tan is our hero," says an art student, 23. One of
the country's few prominent female painters, Dinh Y Nhi, 28, paints haunting
images of women in grays and blacks, a departure from the more common
depiction of slender beauties in flowing ao dai riding bicycles. One of her
paintings shows a man with two wives who are fighting with him. Seizing upon
the issue of marital infidelity, the recently married Nhi differs from women
of her mother's generation in that she will not tolerate a husband's
affairs.
Her art breaks with conformity as well. "I used to paint in a traditional
style, but I felt unhappy with it. It was boring. So I decided to change my
style." That attitude may be what makes Vietnamese art more than a simple
fad--and saves it from the cultural arbiters and the gallery entrepreneurs
who want to dictate what the country's art should be.
End.
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D I E^~N DD A` N V A( N H O. C
===================================== 7 ======================================
TRANH VIE^.T NAM HO^M NAY
Bo^'n trang ba'o tre^n to+` Time so^' dde^` nga`y 26-8-1996 cu?a
ta'c gia? Tim Larimer la` mo^.t trong nhu+~ng ba`i gio+'i thie^.u quan
tro.ng nha^'t ve^` my~ thua^.t Vie^.t Nam ra vo+'i the^' gio+'i, bo+?i
Time la` la` mo^.t to+` tua^`n ba'o lo+'n ba^.c nha^'t o+? My~, co' so^'
pha't ha`nh cao (ho+n 4 trie^.u ba?n/tua^`n) va` ddu+o+.c ddo.c ro^.ng
ra~i o+? nhie^`u nu+o+'c tre^n the^' gio+'i\.
Tha^.t ra, ba`i "Simple pleasures" (Nhu+~ng nie^`m vui dung di.)
cu?a Tim Larimer cu~ng chi? mo+'i kha?o sa't ho^.i ho.a ddu+o+ng dda.i o+?
phi'a Ba('c vo+'i ca'c ta'c gia? ddang ddu+o+.c gio+'i su+u ta^.p va` co'
chuye^n mo^n nu+o+'c ngoa`i quan ta^m; song ca'ch na`o ddo' ta'c gia?
cu~ng dda~ nha^.n die^.n ddu+o+.c nhu+~ng nghe^. si~ ta.o hi`nh dda'ng
chu' y' nha^'t cu?a ho^.i ho.a VN ho^m nay - nhu+~ng ngu+o+`i ma` no'i
nhu+ David Thomas, gia'm ddo^'c Chu+o+ng tri`nh nghe^. thua^.t DDo^ng
Du+o+ng (Indochina Arts Project), ngu+o+`i dda~ ddu+'ng ra to^? chu+'c
nhie^`u trie^?n la~m my~ thua^.t VN tre^n dda^'t My~, thi` ho. "dda~ ke^'t
ho+.p ddu+o+.c mo^.t ca'ch ngoa.n mu.c ca'i bi' a^?n cu?a nghe^. thua^.t
phu+o+ng DDo^ng vo+'i su+. pho^? qua't cu?a ho^.i ho.a phu+o+ng Ta^y\."
Ca'c ho.a si~ ddo' kho+?i dda^`u tu+` Bu`i Xua^n Pha'i va`
ngu+o+`i ba.n cu`ng tho+`i vo+'i o^ng la` Nguye^~n Tu+ Nghie^m,cho to+'i
lo+'p tre? ngoa`i ba mu+o+i nhu+ DDa(.ng Xua^n Hoa`, Tra^`n Lu+o+ng, Le^
Thie^'t Cu+o+ng... va` tre? ho+n nu+~a nhu+ nu+~ ho.a si~ DDinh Y' Nhi, 28
tuo^?i. Ne^'u nhu+ ca'c ba^.c tha^`y Pha'i, Nghie^m dda~ pha?i vu+o+.t qua
nhie^`u kho' kha(n dde^? sa'ng ta.o thi` lo+'p tre? nga`y nay nhu+ lo+`i
Le^ Thie^'t Cu+o+ng:" Chu'ng to^i co' the^? ve~ thoa?i ma'i va` co'the^?
ba'n nhu+~ng gi` mi`nh ve~ ddu+o+.c." Ca'ch dda^y khoa?ng na(mna(m, tranh
Pha'i co' the^? mua vo+'i gia' 100USD, song nga`y nay gia' tranh cu?a o^ng
dda~ ta(ng ga^'p nhie^`u la^`n. Mo^.t nha` su+u ta^.p ta.i TP.HCM, theo
Tim Larimer cho bie^'t, dda~ vu+`a ba'n mo^.t bu+'c cu?a o^ng cho mo^.t
nha` su+u ta^.p Ha`n Quo^'c vo+'i gia' 36000 USD. Co' ddie^`u tranh gia?
cu?a Pha'i cu~ng kho^ng i't tre^n thi. tru+o+`ng. Theo Tim Larimer thi`
o+? mo^.t gallery ta.i Ha` No^.i, ca'ch nha` cu?a Nguye^~n Tu+ Nghie^m
kho^ng bao xa, ngu+o+`i ta cu~ng ba`y ba'n tranh gia' cu?a o^ng vo+'i gia'
1000 USD/bu+'c, dde^'n ddo^. chi'nh nha` nghe^. si~ dda~ 74 tuo^?i na`y
cu~ng pha?i ke^u le^n:" To^i mong sao nhu+~ng ke? kinh khu?ng a^'y ngu+`ng
sao che'p tranh to^i."
Le^Thie^'t Cu+o+ng, 34 tuo^?i, la` mo^.t hie^.n tu+o+.ng cu?a
ho^.i ho.a VN. Anh dda~ ro+`i kho?i tru+o+`ng vi` phong ca'ch "kho^ng
gio^'ng ai" cu?a mi`nh, va^.y ma` tranh cu?a Cu+o+ng hie^.n nay, theo Tim
Larimer, dda~ co' nhu+~ng bu+'c ddu+o+.c ba'n vo+'i gia' 40000 USD.
DDa(.ng Xua^n Ho`a cu~ng la` mo^.t trong nhu+~ng khuo^n ma(.t
ddu+o+.c gio+'i su+u ta^.p tranh nu+o+'c ngoa`i dda'nh gia' cao. Tranh
cu?a Ho`a khie^'n go+.i nho+' to+'i Matisse, song anh la.i su+? du.ng
nhie^`u bie^?u tu+o+.ng va` truye^`n thuye^'t VN trong ta'c pha^?m:
nhu+~ng bi`nh tra`, me`o , ca' ho'a long...Hoa` no'i :"Tranh to^i co' ve?
gio^'ng nhu+ la` tranh phuo+ng Ta^y ddo^'i vo+'i ngu+o+`i nu+o+'c ngoa`i,
nhu+ng mo^.t ngu+o+`i Vie^.t la.i nhi`n tha^'y no' la` cu?a VN." Truye^`n
tho^'ng va` hie^.n dda.i, ddo' la` va^'n dde^` muo^n thuo+? cu?a nghe^.
thua^.t, song nhu+ ho.a si~ Tra^`n Lu+u Ha^n, kha(?ng ddi.nh:" Khive~,
to^i cha(?ng quan ta^m to+'i ba?n sa('c hay dda(.c tru+ng da^n to^.c.
Ta^m ho^`n to^i la` VN." Hay nhu+ Nguye^~n Tu+ Nghie^m no'i:" Nghe^.
thua^.t VN khi anh ti`m tha^'y phong ca'ch rie^ng cu?a mi`nh." DDie^`u
o^ng no'i du+o+`ng nhu+ dda~ ddu+o+.c DDinh Y' Nhi chu+'ng thu+.c. La`
mo^.t trong kho^ng nhie^`u la('m ca'c ta'c gia? nu+~ no^?i ba^.t hie^.n
nay, DDinh Y' Nhi dda~ tu+` bo? nhu+~ng co^ ga'i my~ mie^`u ma(.c a'o da`i
ddi xe dda.p dde^? ve~ nhu+~ng hi`nh nha^n nu+~ lo+?n vo+?n trong mo^.t
the^' gio+'i chi? co' hai ma`u dden va`xa'm ma` qua nhu+~ng ta'c pha^?m
a^'y co^ dda~ dde^` ca^.p to+'i nhu+~ng va^'n dde^` lo+'n cu?a nu+~
gio+'i: bi`nh dda(?ng vo+'i nam gio+'i va` su+. thie^'u thuy? chung.
NGUYE^.T CA^`M
(TTCN 1-9-1996)
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