The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Vietnamese Artists: Making Do, Digging In, Breaking Out Ian Howard The choice of artists from Vietnam was not based on any significant position they may or may not hold within the taxonomy or hierarchy of Vietnamese art. Rather, they were selected because they and their works are agents for the representation of core experiences within a challenged and challenging country. VO Dan Tan has spent his considerable artistic life, which has been filled with ambition and courageous intentions, making do within his constrained material and intellectual world. Dang Thi Khu~ has, over recent decades, been an important theorist within cultural debate in Vietnam. She is now able, perhaps for the first time, to dig in, to consolidate, and explore more fully than ever before, her recent ideas. Mai Anh Dung, the youngest artist, is breaking out of the past and determinedly constructing his own future which, it appears, will have a new balance of spiritual and material experience. The works of these three artists are like roadsigns into modern Vietnam. It is, however, important to provide a historical context for recent developments in Vietnamese art in order to fully appreciate the selection of artists and art works made by the curatorial team. Contemporary Vietnamese art is rapidly abandoning evidence of the Chinese, French and Soviet influences which have been progressively absorbed during this century. The Chinese influence was strongest in the material sense. Silk painting flourished through an availability of materials and exposure to the painting technique, although Vietnamese subject-matter was less mystical, always more homely and down to earth. The more dominant and formal French influence of impressionism, post-impressionism and the School of Paris emerged from the establishment in 1925 of the Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts de l'lndochine in Hanoi. Some of its original buildings still remain on the site which is now the Hanoi University of Fine Art. Intriguingly, one of the older grand studios has a floor to ceiling door too narrow for anyone but a small child to squeeze through. Its original purpose was to enable large three and four-metre high can– vasses to be brought into the studio while remaining on their stretchers and frames. This is indicative of the nature and scale of the colonial impact the French instructors had during the period 1920-1940. The Soviet Union exerted a significant cultural influence in the North of Vietnam during the 1960s, and on the whole of the country from 1975 to the latter part of the 1980s. Consequently, works typical of Soviet social realism dominated the state– supported institutional and limited private art practice that occurred during this time. Common subjects included state enterprises and the solidarity of workers and soldiers-together making the land work for the common good, often against a common (Western) enemy. During the so-called revolutionary period, 1945-1975, which included wars fought against the French, the Americans and their allies, including Australians, materials for private art works were extremely scarce, forcing Vietnamese artists to use only small quantities of the most basic materials. This led generally to a concentration on drafting skills and an understandable economy of line. It could be argued, that, as a result of the commitment to extensive formal training since the 1920s, linked with a focus on ideological and cultural storytelling, the Vietnamese developed, within a figurative and decorative framework, works of unsurpassed political efficacy. By the late 1980s, the Vietnamese Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet decreed that there should be a more open door policy-Doi Moi-in the commercial and cultural life of Vietnam. This allowed a new independence for artists and encouraged freedom to experiment; along with more open and consequently increased opportunities to exhibit and market their works. The result has been a rapid expansion of the economy and a boom in visual arts activity, including an increase in the number of practising artists.The range and scope of works produced is greater and prices of both historical and recently produced Vietnamese art have steeply accelerated. These recent developments have predominantly occurred in the precincts of Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hue. This has fostered two distinct lines of artistic development. Firstly, the ready adoption of materials, techniques, styles and, more recently content, similar to that of artists working in metropolitan cities around the world. Rapid change in the cities, travel, and other forms of exposure to developments within modernism and post– modernism have meant that artists are now concerned about and respond, albeit in personal ways, to the largely formalist international themes of deconstruction and abstraction. Secondly, because many elements of Vietnamese urban life remain closely allied to a rural lifestyle, the Vietnamese crafts of ceramics, printmaking, lacquerware, weaving and puppetry have remained popular art forms in themselves and continue to exert a strong influence upon the more individualistic and experimental works of painters and sculptors. This referencing means that the subject-matter and themes of many of Vietnam's artists still emerge from folk and rural traditions. Dominant in much work is the rural storytelling theme of the land and its harvest; the traditional village life of paddy fields, lanes, houses and marketplaces etc. , all conceptualised and rendered as beauty personified. Although traditional subject-matter remains a common focus for artists during this watershed of Vietnamese art, opportunities, expectations and demands for reinterpretation, invention and speculation upon these themes are emerging from reassessment and, with some artists, examination for the first time of developments in the art forms of other countries. Artists of all generations are now gaining opportunities to travel throughout Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States where previously, destinations tended to be restricted to the then colonial and the politically influential nations of France and the Soviet Union. The decorative qualities of earlier Vietnamese art have remained central to contemporary painting in both its figurative and abstract forms.This continuing emphasis on decoration and patterning is perhaps also an outcome of the ongoing curriculum within training institutions with its emphasis on lengthy, highly-concentrated study using limited and prized materials. Rendering skills and exquisite patternmaking are a competitive goal. As well, the earlier Chinese and more recent French and Soviet styles that were most acceptable to Vietnamese artists exalted the role of composition as a central ingredient of a successful work. Qualities of composition and consideration of decorative elements of form, pattern and colour contributed significant meaning to the finished works. These qualities, therefore, either added to the intent of the paintings or, used less astutely, detracted from it, thereby lessening the art work due to (in the Western sense) a downgrading of compositional elements to mere applied decoration. Certainly, the changing political environment has meant that, at times, works of particular ideological character have dominated. Revolutionary prints and posters that undoubtedly had become inspi– rational common currency during the late 1960s and early 1970s merged with the earlier French impressionist landscape painting and the later Soviet socialist realism images. Grand-scale military history paintings, abundantly popular with artists and commissioning government institutions during the 1970s and 1980s, have all but disappeared within the decade of the 1990s. Since Doi Moi, there has been a dramatic and unprecedented shift from the figurative and the overtly political to the imaginative and spiritual, from the functionaily and sometimes sublimely illustrative to the symbolic mark, gesture and surface. Change in the nature of visual arts practice of this scale and at such a rate is perhaps unprecedented in the Asia-Pacific region. The evolution in the political and economic philosophy of Vietnam, which has enabled recent developments in the visual arts, has run parallel with the rapid expansion, from a low base, of the national economy. Facilitators of cultural change during this period have included the already long– established art education institutions, the extensive and historically powerful artists' associations, the rapidly expanding commercial gallery sector cu RATO RI A L E ss AY s: sou TH A ND sou T H- EA s T A s I A I 49