The Gallery Deli, Ho Chi Minh City
Hanoi's art scene is hot, hot, Hot
Pho Isn't Just Hot in Little Saigon
Hello and welcome to the August edition of Vietnam Art Gallery!
This month we would like to extend a special invitation to all art (and food) lovers traveling to Ho Chi Minh city. Drop in to our new art gallery/café for the best in Vietnamese art and food. Mention this newsletter for an especially warm welcome!
Home of Vietnam Art Gallery: Gallery Deli, Ho Chi Minh City
The Internet Cafe inside
What better way to stimulate your senses - enjoy a coffee or cocktail while taking in the delights of artists such as Minh Duc and Lai Long. C'mon - you know you want to!
Yours in good blessings, Giang and Donald, Le Xuan Art Gallery, First Floor, 44 Dong Khoi Street, Dist.1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
=============== CONTENTS ===============
- Hanoi's art scene is hot, hot, Hot! Over the past decade, as Southeast Asia has rebounded from widespread recession, the city of Hanoi has turned into a mecca for art, culture and cuisine. Go >>
- Featured artist. This month we feature the art of Luong Dung - a favorite of café visitors and gallery clients, Luong's minimalist visions of aesthetic youths sway and shimmer. Go >>
- Pho Isn't Just Hot in Little Saigon Three or four times a week, Miguel Torres stops by the small Santa Ana, California, restaurant for his favorite meal. Before he can sit down, the waitress beckons: "The usual, Miguel?"Go >>
=== Hanoi's art scene is hot, hot, Hot! ===
Nearly a thousand years ago, legend has it, King Ly Thai To moved his capital to a town on the banks of the Red River and named it Thang Long - "the ascending dragon.'' The city's contemporary name means "the land between rivers.'' But in many ways, Hanoi is once again a dragon on the rise.
Over the past decade, as Southeast Asia has rebounded from widespread recession, the city has turned into a mecca for art, culture and cuisine. And right now, it's enjoying something of a magic balance, with enough of an infrastructure to comfortably appeal to travelers without feeling overrun, overpriced or McStarbucked.
Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi's sultry Southern sister, long contended for the title "Paris of the East,'' but these days it's Hanoi, with its wide boulevards and colonial architecture, that feels like a European gem.
Once a Stalinist town so sterile that author David Lamb tells of postwar expatriates pleading with new arrivals to bring colorful posters, Hanoi now breathes with a soft artistic energy -- yet also hums with entrepreneurial zeal.
"The energy is palpable, exciting, and I love the buzz,'' says veteran expat Suzanne Lecht, who helped pioneer Hanoi's gallery scene and is now recognized as an international expert on Vietnamese art.
The arts, along with lingering fascination about the city's wartime past, are a big factor in Hanoi's tourism renaissance. According to government statistics, there were 950,000 foreign visitors to Hanoi last year -- a 240 percent increase from five years earlier. The normalization of relations with the United States a decade ago helped open up such ferocious economic opportunities that a visitor to Hanoi could be forgiven for wondering where all the communists went.
When my wife and I first came here in 1994, Noi Bai Airport was a squat, two-story concrete bunker. Today, the bunker sits in the shadow of a glass-and-steel terminal that wouldn't be out of place in any international metropolis. It's still a 45-minute drive into the city, but unlike that first trip, this time we zoomed along a ribbon of superhighway between lush green paddies.
That road gets a good workout. The government-run Viet Nam News reported that about 3,000 new cars are licensed in Hanoi each month. By late last year, the city was home to more than 150,000 cars and 1.6 million motorbikes. "We will soon run out of space,'' one worried police official was quoted as saying.
Where's the money for all those new Hondas coming from? Ask Lecht, who moved to Hanoi from Tokyo in 1994. Hanoi's art scene is hot, hot, hot -- the neighborhoods west of the old Opera House and northwest of Hoan Kiem Lake are bricked with galleries.
Lecht, who runs the simply named Art Viet Nam Gallery, remembers when a painter was lucky to fetch $50 or $75 for an original work. "When I first came here, the power was cut every day for a few hours. I got used to bathing in a plastic tub by candlelight.''
Today, she says, thanks in large part to an influx of foreign art junkies, it's common for Vietnam's artists to snare $3,000 a pop for their paintings -- in a country where per capita income still hovers around $500 a year.
"Gone are the lazy days when artists would sit around all day espousing poetry, discussing philosophy," Lecht says. "Now everyone is busy -- busy working, busy studying, busy getting ahead.''
And, she admits, "I feel a little nostalgic for those old romantic evenings of flickering gas lights, cyclo rides around Hoan Kiem lake in the softly falling rain.''
One piece in Lecht's gallery especially catches the eye and imagination: a small canvas with a gleaming F-4 fighter slicing across the sky. Slung below the jet's pylons are not only missiles, but also bulging shopping bags. The irony is obvious: Who really won the war?
Walking south from the gallery, we enter Hanoi's Old Quarter with its 36 Streets -- a picturesque, humming hive where every few blocks are dedicated to selling just one kind of item. There are Shoes Street, Cotton Street, Sweet Potato Street, clusters of stores that sell only traditional Buddhist altars or tin chimneys.
Yet there are plenty of new wares to be found. Corner shops hawk bootleg CDs and DVDs by the hundred. Newbie galleries proffer lacquerware, baskets, batiks, hand-stitched hill-tribe clothing. And a returned refugee -- 32-year-old David Thai -- has opened a string of high-end java bars, Highlands Coffee, that would rival Starbucks. In a March interview in Fortune, Thai -- whose family fled Vietnam when he was a toddler and who fell in love with coffee as a student in Seattle -- said he's adding a new cafe to his two-dozen-store chain every six weeks. "This is beyond my wildest imagination,'' he said.
To get a real sense of how things have changed, stop in at 96 Hang Gai (Silk Street), home to Khaisilk. From this single store opened in 1980, the mononymic Khai has built an empire that includes restaurants, boutiques and resorts. His Web site assaults the senses with pumping techno music and models in designer sunglasses -- it's all a bit much, but in a way, it's perfectly nouveau Hanoi.
The influx of tourist dough could lead to purist hand wringing, but the Hanoi bureaucrats seem to have done a good job of preserving their city's architectural character, pushing most of the new development away from the historic core. Once-derelict remnants from the colonial days like the Opera House and fabled Hotel Metropole have been rescued and beautifully spruced up.
Another well-preserved antique is the teak house where, according to party lore, Ho Chi Minh lived and died. A plaque in front of the garage that shelters some of Ho's private vehicles bears an unintentionally funny message: "Ho Chi Minh's Used Cars.'' Capitalism hasn't gone quite that far in Vietnam. At least, not yet.
Then there's Hoa Lo prison -- the infamous "Hanoi Hilton'' -- which before it was home to American prisoners of war was kept well stocked with Vietnamese revolutionaries when the French ran things. The museum gives a respectable and respectful accounting of the bad old days, with a vintage guillotine in a courtyard and stirring accounts of how locked-up leftists managed to sneak messages in and out of the thick walls.
Two-thirds of the original prison was bulldozed in the early 1990s, and the glass-and-granite Hanoi Towers now loom above the prison wall. I can't help but wonder who would choose such a view for their office or penthouse apartment.
Still, it's quite a feat to have turned an infamous house of horrors into a first-class museum.
In many ways, the fusion of the old French building and the artful new touches is a perfect metaphor for the city's current state of being. "Hanoi still has all its charm, but it is modernizing very quickly,'' says Bobby Chinn, a San Francisco-trained chef who operates the city's hottest restaurant -- aptly named Restaurant Bobby Chinn.
Chinn, 40, is closing in on a decade of running high-end gourmet dining spots in Hanoi, including one on the site of the old prison ground. "When I got here, it was barren of ingredients,'' he recalls. "The chickens were tough, the duck was anemic, basic ingredients were lacking in quality. In the old days it was like smashing your head into a brick wall.
"Today, we have great ducks that are used for foie gras, and there are a lot more importers of fine food and fine wines.'' Chinn's restaurant also showcases -- and sells -- works from some of Hanoi's top artists; he even has an art consultant.
But Chinn -- like Lecht -- also mourns a bit for the slower, simpler days. "I am dreading,'' he admits, "the entry of the fast-food chains.''
VietnamArtGallery.com artists from Hanoi currently include
Bich Ngoc,
Le Thiet Cuong,
Mai Long,
Minh Phu,
Nghiem Quang,
Nguyen Duy Nhi,
Van Anh.
==== Featured artist: Luong Dung ====
This month we feature the art of Luong Dung - a favorite of café visitors and gallery clients, Luong's minimalist visions of aesthetic youths sway and shimmer.
Luong Dung - Country Girl 13 - $600 - more >>
Luong Dung - Country Girl 2 - $600 - more >>
Dung's use of curved lines and excellent blocks of textured colour gives the work a truly unique feeling.
Minh Phuong - Bamboo Frame 10 - $1,000 - more >>
Phuong's minimal inkiness frames feelings of an asian fantasia, warm and illuminated beings in the midst of a calm ritual we're somehow included within.
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 and most importantly, kite-flying!
=== Pho Isn't Just Hot in Little Saigon ===
Three or four times a week, Miguel Torres stops by the small Santa Ana, California, restaurant for his favorite meal. Before he can sit down, the waitress beckons: "The usual, Miguel?"
The usual is a steaming bowl of Vietnamese pho (pronounced "fuh"), a simple soup filled with rice noodles swimming in a transparent, flavorful broth. Torres, 32, was introduced to it a few years ago and says he's addicted now.
"Nothing beats it. It's better than my mom's posole,'' he says, slurping the silky noodles from his spoon. "But don't tell her I said that.'' The first to open in Orange County in 1980, Torres' favorite shop, Santa Ana's Pho Hien Vuong, represents how cross-cultural and mainstream pho has become.
Pho Hien Vuong owner Chanh Hoang now marvels at the many judges and lawyers from the nearby courthouse who regularly lunch at his eatery, which has a predominately Hispanic clientele. At Pho 54 in Westminster, the typical lunch crowd includes young professionals, city officials and police officers.
And pho shops have opened well beyond Orange County's 'Little Saigon' - in Anaheim Hills, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Orange and Placentia, among other cities.
Perhaps the most obvious sign of pho's coming of age: Chicken soup powerhouse Campbell Soup Co. is testing a pho soup base that may wind up in grocery stores soon.
"Thirty years is just about the right time for an ethnic community to start getting mainstreamed,'' said Mai Pham, restaurateur and author of "Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table'' cookbook. ''And pho, for the Vietnamese, is the way to do it.
"Consider the Chinese and other immigrant communities that have been here longer with foods that have become popular with the mainstream,'' she said. "As people became more open to the foods, they also become more open to the cultures. Food is the way to connect people to different cultures. It's part of the mainstreaming process.''
Its simplicity and affordable cost - at around $4 a bowl - has helped pho join the ranks of other mainstreamed ethnic fare like tacos and sushi.
The painstaking preparation of the soup belies its simple appearance. It takes about eight hours of simmering a cauldron of beef or chicken bones to create the pho broth, cooked with aromatic spices like star anise, cinnamon, charred ginger and onion.
"It's all in the broth,'' said Hoang. "A good broth should be as clear as possible and have the deep aroma and taste.''
Hundreds of pho shops have cropped up in the Vietnamese business district of Little Saigon since Vietnamese refugees arrived in Orange County in the late 1970s. The names - Pho 54, Pho 79 and Pho 88 - indicate what year the restaurant opened, although Pho 54 commemorates the year in which the soup became popular in South Vietnam.
A quick glance in the Yellow Pages shows at least 50 pho restaurants in Orange County - though pho addicts will tell you there are a few hundred in Westminster and Garden Grove alone. At Pho Hien Vuong, Hoang says he's noticed his customers make the pho their own by the way they flavor it. His Hispanic customers love to douse the bowl of pho with plenty of chili sauce, lime and cilantro.
Hoang even began serving Pho cama-rones, with shrimp added to the soup before serving, after his Hispanic customers kept requesting it. It's now the most popular pho ordered by Hispanic diners at the Santa Ana shop.
"They also asked me to make a lobster pho,'' Hoang said, chuckling. "But I said, 'Do you want to pay $10 then for a bowl of pho or continue paying $4?'"
Daughter Trang Hoang said Laotians add sugar and a sweet hoisin sauce. White diners prefer boneless, skinless chicken strips in their soup - hold the giblets and egg yolks.
Other Asian entrepreneurs are capitalizing on the popularity of pho shops. In Garden Grove's Korean business district, Korean restaurateurs have opened pho shops sandwiched between Korean eateries. Pho shops have also opened in Los Angeles' Koreatown, staying open until 3 a.m. to catch the after-hours nightclub crowds.
The shops springing up in other parts of Orange County often adopt names to suit their clientele. In Los Angeles, the new pho shops have names like Pho-topia and Pho Express.
On a recent overcast day, surfers in wet suits and town locals crowded the 9-month-old Pho My Man shop near the corner of Main Street and Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach. Owner Soai Nguyen said he has always loved the beach, so he was excited to open a pho shop near the pier. Nguyen said most of his customers are white.
"They come in here already knowing how to eat pho,'' said Nguyen, who owned a pho shop in Florida before moving to California. "It's pretty neat. Then they bring their friends to try it and teach them how to eat it. It happens all the time.''
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?
Subscription policy: You're receiving this information because you signed up at our website - http://www.vietnamartgallery.com. To be removed, simply reply to this message and let us know.