by Jeffrey Hantover

Art in America 03/95

Vietnamese painters won the war: they persisted with their work despite Communist Party and government harassment, reeducation, ideological straitjackets and malign neglect. Now can they win the peace? Before doi moi (renovation) began in 1987, artists could not paint what they wished or show their work unfettered and unafraid in public: abstraction, still lifes and nudes were considered self-indulgent, decadent and subversive. Today there are no more taboos (except perhaps irreverent treatment of Uncle Ho).

The history of Western painting in Vietnam, barely a century old, has a compressed, telescopic character. The first known oil painting by a Vietnamese dates to 1898. Painting as an independent profession emerged only after the 1925 founding by the French of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine (the only fine-arts academy established by a colonial power in Southeast Asia). Tentative forays into Cubism began in the 1930s.

The slow march to Vietnamese modernism was diverted by the August Revolution of 1945 and the war against the French: the banner of the nascent urban bourgeoisie in the 1930s--art for art's sake--was lowered, not to be flown again for 40 years. The first public display of nudes since the August Revolution was in 1982; the first private gallery in Ho Chi Minh City after unification opened in 1989. The first one-person exhibition of the country's most famous painter, Bui Xuan Phai (1921-1988), was finally permitted in 1984 (almost 30 years after he ran afoul of the government for supporting a movement for expanded cultural and political freedom). And it wasn't until May 1992 that the first national abstract painting exhibition was held. This exhibition of more than 80 works by 40 painters was organized by an artist and a critic, and was held in a Ho Chi Minh City gallery. In permitting it, the government revealed a change in thinking.

Doi moi has expanded the realm of the private in culture as well as in the economy, allowing commercial galleries to function and making it possible for artists to be financially independent. Most important of all, it permits the public expression of individual vision. When I first interviewed Vietnamese artists in 1991, what cut across considerations of gender, age, region, medium and style was a modernist affirmation: that the artist's role is to express an inner vision. Painters rejected descriptive realism for a subjective and expressive art. Dang Xuan Hoa spoke for all modern Vietnamese artists with his commitment to paint "not what I see but what lies beneath what I see." The 1992 national exhibition legitimated the primacy of personal expression over party and government agendas. Art was no longer to be an instrument of the state but of the individual.

Abstractionist Dao Minh Tri said recently that in the past, much time was lost fighting over what was "right art and wrong art. Now we are fighting whether it is good or bad art." Yet there remains in the current battle a lingering cultural nationalism, an exclusionary "Vietnameseness" not solely the province of anti-abstractionist conservatives. Even now, in this overwhelmingly rural country, where the past lives in the visible present, a painting that does not in some way incorporate village images is considered un-Vietnamese.

After three decades of isolation, the models of what art can be are still limited. Photography is almost exclusively reportage, sculpture is primarily commemorative and figurative, performance art does not exist, and the only exhibition that could claim to be "installation art" was a 1992 show by a Saigon cartoonist who used his daughters' dolls and toys to gently satirize bureaucratic corruption and capitalist greed. Even the better private galleries, such as Mai Gallery and Ecole de Hanoi in Hanoi or Hong Hac and Gallery Saigon in Ho Chi Minh City, hang paintings by the same artists floor to ceiling. (Espace NK--Art Contemporain in Ho Chi Minh City, funded in part by the French government, stands in refreshing contrast to the dominant salon-style presentation.) Modernism in the North.

The national modernist style had its origins in the North, where it remains strongest. In the North an almost xenophobic definition of Vietnamese cultural identity served as a weapon in the fight against the French and the Americans. There existed, it was argued, a distinct Vietnamese culture that stretched back four millennia to the Dong Son bronze drums and had survived a thousand years of Chinese domination. Southern talk of merging East and West was seen in the North as an effort to weaken revolutionary unity and will. Western art was capitalist art and was off limits after 1954. The only politically safe road to modernism in the North was, one might say, through the village.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Nguyen Tu Nghiem (b. 1922) was the first Vietnamese painter to draw directly from village arts, and if any artist can be said to be the father of Vietnamese modernism it is Nghiem. Early European modernists found in the art of Oceania and Africa an affirmation of their break with Renaissance perspective and esthetics; Nghiem found it closer to home, in Central Highlands funerary sculpture, pagoda and temple figures, communal house (dinh) carvings and Dong Ho woodblock prints. The 17th- and 18th-century dinh carvings, chiseled on walls, beams and trusses, are direct, dense, multiperspective depictions of everyday village life. These carvings, along with the simple, childlike wooden figures atop Highland burial logs and jars, and popular Tet (Lunar New Year) woodblock prints with their bold, unnatural contrasts of color, multiple perspectives and black-lined figures, were esthetic kin of Western modernism. Here was politically noncontroversial art--indigenous, communal and celebratory of peasant virtues and life. For over 40 years, Nghiem has depicted zodiac animals, the characters of popular myth and literature, and village dances and festivals in paintings that are direct, dense and pulsing with energy and movement. This imagery allowed him to be both a cultural patriot and a modernist during the war and repression. Almost all major artists under 50 in the North are Nghiem's heirs. Of course, for many artists North and South, the motifs, images and spirit of village art have become elements in an overused vocabulary, a melange of water buffalo, young herdsmen, Buddhas, temple statuary, lotus flowers and pagoda offerings displayed with little creativity. But within the dominant modernist style there are painters who are doing strong, individual work. A small but growing number are challenging traditions. The best, like Nguyen Quan (b. 1948) and Dang Xuan Hoa (b. 1959), combine references to village life and art with their own personal and poetic visions. Quan, an art historian as well as a painter, has been the most prolific and insightful student of village arts. He has created an impressive body of work that marries the expressive exploration of his psyche with village motifs and images. Recent still lifes and paintings based on sculptural forms (on his own wooden sculpture or rocks used as village shrines for prayer offerings) are less dense with imagery than his work of the late 1980s. In his current, spatially ambiguous dark dreamscapes, bulbous, fruitlike feminine forms have room to breathe against sgraffitoed blocks of color.

Hoa, of a slightly younger generation of artists, is often grouped in the "Gang of Five" along with Viet Dung, Ha Tri Hieu, Tran Luong and Pham Quang Vinh. All are painters and friends in their thirties who graduated from the Hanoi School of Fine Arts and have received increasing attention in the last two years. They have been enthusiastically promoted by Duong Tuong, translator, critic and now owner of Mai Gallery. Beneath the hype lies talent and individual visions. Hoa left in early 1994 for a six-month residency with Boston's Indochina Arts Project and exhibited at New York's East-West Project Room and Emmanuel College's Lillian Immig Gallery. His paintings, looser and more fluid in gouache than oil, have a free-associational exuberance; imaginary animals, common domestic objects and traditional artifacts pack a shallow picture plane. Hoa may be the best known of the Gang of Five, but Luong (b. 1960) possesses the most distinctive, sustained vision. In Vietnam there are more good paintings than good painters: many young artists produce one good work amid a slew of mediocrities as they flit from style to style, genre to genre, in search of their own artistic voice or commercial success. Luong stands out for the high quality of his ongoing series of oil and gouache works, "Under the Water," in which imaginary biomorphic creatures float and flit at the edge of abstraction. Luong's oils have become richer and more infused with light since his return from Holland in late 1993, where he exhibited at Amsterdam's Tropenmuseum and spent a month working with Dutch painters and installation artists. After having experimented there with mixed-medium and installation art, Luong feels "like a soldier with a new gun, a modern gun." Two years ago, Vinh (b. 1960) showed promise, but on the whole his work was soft, lyrical and a bit too pretty, and ultimately impersonal. His most recent work--abstract and semi-abstract gouaches on pink paper and Chinese ink on card-board--is more compact, harder-edged, angrier, more urgent. His dog paintings in celebration of the Year of the Dog, are strong and direct, reminiscent of Susan Rothenberg's expressive horses. While Dung (b. 1962) may not in the long run have the impact of Hoa or Luong on the direction of Vietnamese art, he is an assured artist who productively mines a narrow vein. His deserted streets and empty villages painted with a muted and serene palette are excuses to explore the play of light, shadow and form.

Among another five Hanoi artists (these championed by critic-artist Phan Cam Thuong), Nguyen Quoc Hoi and Dinh Quan are particularly worth watching. Hoi (b. 1960) offers solitary figures with tiny, downcast features in large heads, who stand in evocative but undefined places. Quan (b. 1964) makes surreal dreamscapes of misty, muffled objects and spaces. However, the one artist in Hanoi--in all Vietnam--who is challenging the traditional center, who is taking the primacy of inner vision to its most radical extension, is Truong Tan (b. 1963). He is the only openly gay painter in Vietnam, the only artist whose sexual life is the subject of his work. This would warrant only a footnote if his powerful art did not pose challenges to the exclusionary definition of Vietnamese art. Tan is one of the few artists using mixed mediums in his work--photographs, ropes, shattered mirrors, chains, surgical instruments covered with mock blood. He is the only one incorporating text in his paintings, playing with language, exploring the cost and consequences of social repression. Tan's recent drawings are populated with talking penises; if he does not become fixated on this device and if Vietnamese painters can read beneath the sexual surface of his work to its radical subtexts, he may be the artist who moves Vietnamese painting into the postmodern world. Abstraction in the South .

Differences of demography, social structure and interaction with the West made divergent cultures of North and South centuries before the 1954 partition. In the 1960s and '70s, Saigon artists embraced internationalism. They were exposed to Western art books and magazines, participated in international exhibitions in Vietnam and abroad, and worked in abstract, Futurist and Cubist styles. The exodus of painters and collectors after 1975, along with violent government campaigns against "Western cultural pollution," cut abstraction dead. It has revived in the last four years, and purchases and exhibitions of abstract works by museums in the North and South can be seen as conciliatory gestures toward Southern artists and their cultural contributions prior to unification.

While still a subordinate style, abstraction is strongest among Southern painters. For many Northern artists in the 1992 national exhibition, abstraction was a passing experiment and they have returned to figuration, landscapes and lyrical expressionism, leaving the field to committed Southerners such as Nguyen Trung, Trinh Cung, Tran Van Thao, Do Hoang Tuong, Nguyen Tan Cuong and Dao Minh Tri. Since a one-year stay in France in 1990-91, Trung (b. 1940), a leading figure in Saigon art circles before 1975, has produced abstract works of increasing subtlety and control. Against black or dark-brown grounds, white brushstrokes slash and thin lines dance like calligraphy seen in photographic negatives. Inspired by a trip to the North, Trung has been engaged over the last two years in a series that tries to capture the mystical play of light in temples and pagodas, where the old worm-eaten wood is "the color of time." Old buildings ready to crumble inspired another recent series in which Trung tries "to express the poetry of ruins, the lyrical sense of their decay and collapse." Thao (b. 1961), one of the most accomplished of the younger abstract painters, doesn't look to the external world for inspiration but directly expresses his own emotional states. His life, he says, has become more troubled and complicated--"a sad period"--and his earlier brighter, more composed works have been replaced by darker, disturbed paintings which make little effort to please.

Like Thao, Nguyen Minh Phuong (b. 1964) displays a painterly intelligence and uses various mediums to confront personal and esthetic issues. Phuong, painter and ceramist, straddles abstraction and expressionism with his galactic world of spheres and black space, where a face or form modeled after Central Highlands funerary figures occasionally floats.

Perhaps only in Vietnam would a realist painter like Do Quang Em (b. 1942) be so radically at odds with the mainstream. Em, one of only two major realist painters in all of Vietnam, was a leading figure in the Young Artists Association in pre-1975 Saigon, but spent three years in jail after a failed attempt to escape the country in 1976. His mother, brother and sons did escape, but he remains in Vietnam, unable to travel outside the country as he awaits American approval to join relatives in California. Em's Zen-like acceptance of the limited compass of his life is reflected in evocative, dramatically lit paintings of his wife and daughter or such humble domestic objects as a bamboo table and a teapot. He claims that grand philosophical ideas are beyond him; he likens himself to a frog at the bottom of the well who can only express what is visible around him, and claims that "even at the bottom of the well is happiness."

A Southern painter equally distant from the mainstream but who renders the opposite of Em's finely wrought domestic world is Tran Trung Tin (b. 1933), whose childlike directness was much admired by the influential Phai (the early modernist who died in '88). Tin took up painting in 1969 while he was a movie actor in Hanoi and is self-taught. After 1975 he returned to Saigon, quit the party and film studio, became a bus attendant and devoted himself to painting. Slowed by a stroke in 1987 and not allowed to show his work publicly until 1989, Tin has drawn increasing attention abroad for small, naive works infused with an existential sadness that seems to rebuke and transcend the political and social situation. French tourists, made comfortable by cafe filtre and baguettes, are everywhere in Vietnam. Pin-striped invaders and overseas Vietnamese with dollar signs in their eyes arrive in increasing numbers. Many want an artistic souvenir of their visit; for them a Vietnamese painting has to look Vietnamese--a lithe girl in ao dai (the traditional high-necked, full-length silk tunic worn with pants) or a pastoral scene with water buffalo, pagoda and peasants in conical hats. Paradoxically, their desire for a recognizably Vietnamese image only reinforces these foreigners' preconceptions, trapping the artists in a no-win situation. Those more knowledgeable want a Phai or a Nghiem. Only a few are interested in a talking penis or a dark, brooding abstraction that has no visible sign of national origin. Other than their own artistic integrity and inner commitment, there is little to make Vietnamese artists resist the commercial mainstream: there is no entrenched academy or dictatorial art association, no institutionally backed official art to spawn an avant-garde reaction. No one is calling for a return to Socialist Realism (which never had the predominance in Vietnam that it had in China or the Soviet Union). The comfort blanket of tradition-based modernism will be thrown off by artists who travel outside the country ("When you stay in Vietnam," says Luong, "art is easy"); by those who through temperament and perseverance discover for themselves the broader possibilities of artistic expression; and by outsiders like Tan, Tin, even Em, who work quietly, listening to a singular inner voice.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Art Publications Inc.