Painting by Numbers; Vietnam counterfeiters now pass off "original fakes"
Co Do village paints life into cultural activities
Diverse activities to be held on Francophone days
Greetings, and welcome to the new look Vietnam Art Gallery newsletter.
In what was possibly the softest launch of all time, our new website went online earlier this month over the space of a week or so. Please pay us a visit and let us know what you think!
This month we feature stories on the new booming art business that isn't exactly making everyone happy: the business of producing fakes! Also, we bring you report on so-called "Francophone days" that are held in Vietnam each year.
Don't forget that you can get a random sampling of work from all our artists here in the "No Fake Zone" :)
=============== CONTENTS ===============
- Painting by Numbers Vietnam counterfeiters now pass off "original fakes." Go >>
- Featured artist. We haven't featured Nghiem Quang in quite a while. And it's time. I hope you agree? Go >>
- Co Do village paints life into cultural activities. "My father taught me to draw when I was only six years old"... Go >>
- Diverse activities to be held on Francophone days. Can you feel the love mon amis? Go >>
=== Painting by Numbers ===
By Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, Newsweek International
Inside small shops along Nguyen Thai Hoc Street, just next to the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum in Hanoi, several graduates from the renowned Hanoi Fine Arts University are hard at work. They're meticulously copying not only famous paintings by Monet and van Gogh but also works by popular Vietnamese contemporary artists like Nguyen Thanh Binh and Dao Hai Phong. The finished pieces will become part of Vietnam's roaring trade in fake paintings.
But they are the honest ones. Their reproductions will be sold as such in Hanoi's "copy shops," often for as little as $40. At the same time, there is a smaller, shadier trade flourishing in "original fakes" - paintings that echo the theme and technique of established contemporary artists and are passed off as their work. Many of them are done at the behest of art dealers. "There are several high-profile art galleries where counterfeit works are represented as originals, sometimes complete with gallery-issued certificates of authenticity," says Adrian Jones, a private collector who started the Witness Collection, featuring more than 200 Vietnamese fine-arts paintings. "While there are exceptional cases in which gallery owners mistakenly believe counterfeit works to be genuine, the majority of such counterfeit works are commissioned by the gallery owners themselves."
The burgeoning counterfeit market may be an inevitable outgrowth of the boom in Vietnamese art. In recent years, the increasing hordes of tourists have begun snapping up skillful paintings of beautiful girls in traditional Vietnamese dress or fishermen in boats on the Mekong River for as much as $5,000. Because Vietnam was isolated for so long - its artists trained in the neoclassical style of the French Academy - retain a craftsmanship lost elsewhere and are in high demand. To accommodate the market, second-tier Vietnamese artists have begun turning out reproductions of contemporary paintings alongside the old masters in "replication workshops" in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. The more touchy "original" fakes are produced in private studios, sometimes by the artist's family members or former assistants. An estimated 40,000 copies of famous works celebrating street life in old Hanoi by Bui Xuan Phai - Vietnam's Picasso, who died penniless in 1988 - hang on walls around the world, with many buyers believing they have an original.
International auction houses are beginning to wise up and tread carefully when agreeing to auction works. "Provenance is very important when it comes to selling old masters, and we are always extra careful when it comes to authenticating old Vietnamese masters' works," says Daniel Komala, director of the Jakarta-based Larasati auctioneers. "Fortunately, so far we haven't encountered any problem."
Not all sellers are so scrupulous. Some of the best-known collectors operate businesses deliberately selling counterfeit paintings to foreigners as a way to help finance their personal collections of originals. Based on the impressive displays that some foreigners mount in their homes or private museums, many have obviously been fooled. The high prices often help convince them that they are buying originals. "Prospective buyers need to undertake their own meticulous research - of both the individual paintings and the reputation of their owners - if they want to avoid making costly mistakes," says Jones.
Because Vietnam has such lax copyright laws, there is little that the duped buyer or violated artist can do. But that's slowly changing; the first official copyright regulations for paintings and sculptures were announced last year. They state that the artist must now "approve" all replicated forms of his or her work and that the copied versions must be exactly the same in content as the original - just smaller or larger. Furthermore, if artists create many similar works of art, they must number and date the versions.
Despite the rise in counterfeit art, the majority of works in Vietnam remain genuine. But that doesn't guarantee that they're original; when the large galleries discover a style that sells, artists' studios are often reduced to little more than painting factories. To a certain extent the success of contemporary Vietnamese painting has stifled creativity, complains Jasdeep Sandhu, owner of the Gajah Gallery in Singapore, which specializes in Vietnamese and Indonesian art. Some galleries are trying to encourage talented young artists to pursue innovation instead of selling formulaic paintings through tourist-oriented galleries. But it's a tough battle; in a newly capitalist economy, an easy buck is hard to resist.
==== Featured artist: Nghiem Quang ====
Nghiem Xuan Quang teams bright colour with black outlines. The art works are reminiscent of stained glass.
Nghiem Quang - Fishing - $160 - more >>
Two dimensional work with black outline surrounding block color, of a woman with a child on her back as she fishes.
Nghiem Quang - Relax 2 - $160 - more >>
Another pale figure of a woman relaxes in the nude beneath a tree laden with fruit. Both paintings in this series would make a lovely diptych.
Hoang Giap - Lotus 2 - $250 - more >>
Simple, rounded abstract with block colours depicting a lady holding a bent lotus bloom.
Minh Phu - 2003 - $300 - more >>
Minh Phu's beautiful, fertile golds, pinks and reds make us imagine what Hanoi must feel like in the fall, resonating with sounds and smells of home, family, animals, food, & planting.
= Co Do village paints life into cultural activities =
From VOV news
Co Do village is located along stretch of river between the two areas where the Red River is joined by the Lo River and the Da River in Ba Vi district in the northern province of Ha Tay.
The late painter, Si Tot, was the first person to bring painting to the lives of Co Do villagers. At first he only taught his relatives. Then other young villagers were attracted to the art. Mr Tot taught local people to draw on the ground with coal, bricks and sticks before using paper as a cheap material for the poor village. They often drew village scenes, ordinary people or objects which are normal parts of Co Do people's daily lives.
"My father taught me to draw when I was only six years old," Mr Tot's son La Vuong recalled. "At the time I was too small to understand and love the art. My father asked us to draw at least 20 paintings a month. If we did not, we would be punished. When we grew up, he told us that we should thoroughly understand what we were drawing. He said that as people born in a rural area, we should know how to farm so that we can reflect farmers' activities in our paintings. When I studied at the Hanoi Fine Arts University, I became fully aware of what my father taught me in the past."
There are 22 professional Co Do artists who have now become members of the provincial and national Fine Arts Association while the number of local amateur painters is uncountable. Most households in the village have at least one person involved in painting. For them, painting is an indispensable activity and a daily entertainment. During hot days, adults often gather at the village's riverbank while children get together at the communal house to draw.
Among the famous Co Do painters is Hoang Tuan Viet. He is not only a lecturer at the Co Do Secondary School but also teaches drawing. As president of the Co Do village's Painters Association, he said he tries his best to transfer his painting skills to younger generations. "Co Do village has a tradition of painting," Mr Viet said. "To preserve and develop the tradition, we hope our village will develop into a craft village. Our younger generation has a passion and love for the homeland, and now I only want to help them with the basic painting techniques so that they can make a living from it. For me, the subjects of my paintings focus on the simple and beautiful features of my native land's landscape, farmers and particularly waterways and fishing activities, as this village is located right on the banks of Da River. I usually use strong and hot colours as I am an active person and I am living in a changing village."
That explains why Tuan Viet's aquarelle paintings are on display in some private art galleries in Canada. Westerners are sometimes sensitive to beautiful features which are purely Vietnamese. Hoang Tuan Viet has many students, 15 of whom are studying in the Music and Painting College or University of Architecture. His daughter also has talent and at the age of 14 won third prize in the province's painting contest.
It's a simple dream for the younger generations to make a name for Co Do village. Every year, Co Do holds its own painting contests for the villagers and many works by amateur painters have been selected for national and international exhibitions in France, Canada and Switzerland.
In 1997, the Ha Tay province gave the title "cultural village" to Co Do village.
== Diverse activities to be held on Francophone days ==
A month-long festival with a host of artistic performances, seminars and exhibitions to highlight the cultural diversity of the French-speaking community will take place in Hanoi beginning on March 16.
Stephan Plumat, Director of the Asian-Pacific Office of the Intergovernmental Francophone Agency (AIF) made the announcement in Hanoi on Thursday.
From March 16-18, there will be seminars and exhibitions with an information society theme.
An official ceremony to mark Francophone Day (March 20) will take place at the International Convention Centre on March 18. This will provide an opportunity for Vietnam to express its strong appreciation for the Francophone Community.
Many activities will be held at the Vietnam-France Culture Centre (L'Espace), including the screening of 100 TV advertisements produced by French-speaking countries, a week-long showing of films in French from Canada, a seminar on the French language, training and employment, jointly held by the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Agency of Francophone Universities (AUF) and AIF, and a night of classical and renaissance music by the trio Laterna Magica.
The Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information will co-operate with the Wallonie-Brussels Delegation and the AIF to organise a workshop on art and culture marketing at the Vietnam History Museum with a special guest, Prof. Jean-Pierre Baeyens from the University of Liberty of Brussels.
Thank you for reading! We wish you peace and good fortune for the coming month!
============== Artist Roster ==============
Our database of up-and-coming artists has doubled in the last few months and we now have over 850 original art pieces in our database -- one of the largest virtual galleries on the Internet! Here's a rundown on the artists you'll find in our pages. Think you can pick the next Bui Xuan Phai?
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