The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 114 Untitled 2015 Sơn tà lacquer on Dau wood / 2 parts, 217 x 55cm (each) / Courtesy: The artist Phi Phi Oanh has specialised in celebrated techniques of sơn tà (Vietnamese lacquer) since 2004, and his practice is notable for its exploration of the technical and conceptual qualities of lacquer as a contemporary medium. Vietnam is one of the few countries in the world with a climate conducive to lacquer, a process of applying tree sap in layers, inlaid in wooden objects and polished to create a hard surface with luminous effect. For her APT10 work, Fissio 2021, Oanh continues a several millennia-long tradition while also shifting lacquer’s contribution to a national cultural narrative. Historically used in the creation of wooden household furnishings, altar sculptures, and decorative objects, the lacquer technique is one of the many Chinese cultural influences integrated into Vietnamese visual culture, arriving from China by the time of the Le Dynasty (1443–60). 1 Lacquer painting is also part of a twentieth-century legacy of the negotiation of Western colonial influences, along with local aspirations for modernism as a compulsory subject at L’École Superieure des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi. 2 After the August revolution of 1945, when the communist- dominated Viet Minh Front seized political power, lacquer painting also persisted as a preferred medium of anti- authoritative or patriotic resistance art. 3 Although lacquer painting was reinvented during the French occupation, it was adopted by revolutionary artists and became enmeshed in twentieth-century struggles for independence and ideological representations of socialist realism. Lacquer remains enmeshed in national ideology and narratives of cultural significance. In Fissio , Oanh asks, in effect, if lacquer — and its content and meanings — remain part of a national consciousness. Fissio is inspired by the tradition of hoành phi câu đối , or poetic antithetical (complementarily opposite) text couplets. Written in the Sino-Vietnamese characters used until the twentieth century, these elegies originally appeared in Northern Vietnam in lacquer plaques framing altars or were incorporated in shrines or flanked passageways. The primary purpose of the couplets was to memorialise heroes, events or deeds; mark a family or group; define morality; praise local attributes or successful ventures; or give thanks for natural bounty. The marginalisation of the couplets increased as the Latin alphabet of the Romanised Vietnamese language (which had been in use in Vietnam’s Catholic communities) was adopted as the standard system in French-colonised Indochina from the late nineteenth century onwards and was completed under communist rule in the 1970s when practising religion was discouraged. 4 The meanings of surviving panels are largely lost, a sensibility Oanh associates with the contemporary dispersal of people and families from ancestral towns and villages and disconnection from physical, natural place and local history. Selecting six couplets by an anti-colonial writer from many thousands she has read, Oanh reinterprets the meanings of the original Hán Nôm ideograms (the literary Sino-Vietnamese writing system used until French occupation) into imagery of her own imagining. Fissio retains the format and medium of the original câu đối , including wood carved in the same craft village that traditionally prepared panels. The sơn mài medium involves the laborious process of collecting materials, primarily the sap of Rhus verniciflua or Rhus succedanea , and applying and burnishing up to 30 layers of resin and other materials over many months — a complex process where the artist is unable to predict the final image until the sanding of the ultimate layer. The six visual couplets are hung in a pantheon-like circular arrangement to create a space with the potential to blend the sacred and secular, mirroring the themes of the original hoành phi câu đối . Poetically crossing time and worlds, Oanh reinterprets typical couplets in order to reconsider their characteristics and themes for an increasingly secular and mobile society. In this way, Fissio brings the wisdom of narratives that are no longer publicly legible into new cross- cultural experiences and memories. Zara Stanhope Endnotes 1 Shireen Naziree, From Craft to Art – Vietnamese Lacquer Paintings including Works from the Collection of the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum , Thavibu Gallery, Bangkok, 2013, p.8. 2 Lacquer was embraced as a local and subsequently patriotic feature, added to the curriculum at L’École Superieure des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine — founded in 1925 and later renamed the Indochina Fine Arts and Applied Arts College — in 1934 by the French Professor of Decorative Arts Joseph Inguimberty (1896–1971), possibly after a visit to the Confucian Temple of Literature in Hanoi in 1927. Distinctive innovations made at the College by artists such as Nguyen Tu Nghiem (1922–2016) and To Noc Van (1906–54) included techniques of inserting egg and snail shell, mother-of-pearl, oils and metallic salts into the traditional brown, red, black, yellow and white pigments and encouraging more realistic and Western representation and themes. 3 Lisa B Safford, ‘Art at the crossroads: Lacquer in French Vietnam’, Transcultural Studies , vol. 1, 2015, pp.126–70. 4 Boi Tran Huynh, ‘Vietnamese Aesthetics from 1925 Onwards’ [thesis submitted for PhD], Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney, 2005, p.78. Phi Phi Oanh Born 1979, Houston, United States Lives and works in Da Nang, Vietnam