Making it new: despite limited funds and bureaucratic trepidation, Hanoi has a burgeoning art scene that features performance, video and collaborative workshops - Report From Hanoi - Vietnam

Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Joe Fyfe

A billboard on the highway from Noi Bai Airport to Hanoi depicts a smiling woman wearing the wide conical hat that is emblematic of the Southeast Asian field-worker. Emblazoned across the foreground in English are the words "Vietnam, Destination for a New Millennium." The airport, about 20 miles from the center of Hanoi, borders farmlands that quickly become suburbs as you approach the city. Four- and five-story structures with terra-cotta roofs and numerous balconies soon appear. Of recent vintage, these tall, narrow, Italianate villas with stucco exteriors painted in tangerine, turquoise, peach and aqua sidle up against traditional thatched farmhouses. Conspicuous consumption, in the form of large private houses, has entered postwar life in Vietnam, but not all is as it seems. Near the bridge to Haiphong Bay, other examples of these Vietnamese McMansions function as "mini-hotels," where, it was explained to me, hourly rooms accommodate "married people who want to meet with others."

Hanoi is dotted with lakes, and the city retains a good portion of its French colonial architecture. Almost every street is tree-lined. As in most of Southeast Asia, the population is young and nearly everyone travels on motorbikes and bicycles. There's also a numbing, attention deadening crust of the most banal aspects of Western culture on the surface of the city. At the first sign of doi moi (restoration), the "open deer" policy that accompanied Vietnam's move toward a free market in the mid-1980s, cultural colonization arrived. Today you find MTV on high volume in many restaurants and Yanni as constant background music in all the cybercafes. Yet Hanoi's reputation is intellectual and artistic, and it has been called the Paris of Southeast Asia.

There are an unusually large number of tourist-art galleries, as if the entire city had been interlarded with little Montmartres. In contrast to the West, where there is a clear distinction between kitschy, souvenir painting and serious work, the line here is blurry. This is partly a result of the Socialist Realism that was encouraged by tie Chi Minh's government. The prevalence of this academic, sentimental style also reflected the large Soviet and Chinese influence. Many Vietnamese artists and writers, if they were officially approved, visited the USSR and its Eastern European satellites. interestingly, the Russian and Chinese presence lingers in the realm of art materials: most of the painters I met during my stay use Chinese oil paint and Russian linen; an excellent brand of Russian water colors is still sold here, too.

The Vietnamese government continues to have a hand in cultural production through state-run galleries. Many of Hanoi's commercial galleries arc, in fact, partly or wholly government run. The artist Nguyen Quang Huy, whose house accommodates one of the best-known alternative spaces for exhibiting challenging new art, told me that "the government is still afraid of new things." Clearly, the state perceives the tourist demand for harmless, well-crafted paintings to be an effective way of bringing income to the people, and encourages their production.

Vietnam's historical relationship with modernist discourse is spotty. In 1925, the French founded the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d'Indochine in Hanoi, the first school of its kind in a French colony. Painting was taught on the European model, with an emphasis on Impressionism, until 1935, when the French director decided that the students should be encouraged to incorporate traditional Vietnamese techniques into their art. Silk painting and lacquer work, techniques previously used only for decorative arts, were introduced into the curriculum of academic painting and sculpture. This produced, in the late 1930s and early '40s, a fashion for making portraits of beautiful, chaste-looking Vietnamese women that were painted on silk in Impressionist style.

Although Socialist Realism subsequently replaced Impressionism, the mix of old and new continued, with works commonly being painted in lacquer. A typical example is Nguyen Si Ngoc's Friendship between the Army and the People (1951), a painting that depicts a happy soldier being given a thirst-quenching drink by an admiring peasant woman. The National Museum in Hanoi is filled with works of this kind, as well as a number of cubistic and expressionistic works by Vietnamese artists who adapted aspects of European art movements. Seen as counter-revolutionary, these artists migrated to the South after the country was divided. (For a concise introduction to Vietnamese art in the 20th century, see Jeffrey Hantover's "Report from Vietnam," in A.i.A., Mar. '95.) Even today, silk painting and lacquer techniques are the main areas of focus at the art school, which is still called the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In order to get a wider-ranging education, many aspiring artists choose to take degrees in art criticism rather than in painting.

By the mid-1990s, the "Gang of Five" (a group of painters from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts) became well known and, in some cases, quite well off. Duong Thong, one of the earliest to write about and to promote this group, 'also notes that this first generation to win acclaim abroad for the most part ignored social commentary in their work. "There seems to be a sort of 'de-ideolegization' in the visual arts encouraged by the market economy," he wrote in an article on Vietnam for Asian Art News in April 1997. Their work was promoted and sold throughout the Pacific Rim, but this part of the art market's vitality faltered somewhat with the economic downturn of 1998. The works of the Gang of Five owed much to mainstream modernism, particularly the colorful paint handling taken from late Picasso.