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December 2003 Newsletter |
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Welcome to the December edition of the Vietnam Art Gallery newsletter. It's great to see you again! Here in Vietnam the rainy season is over and things are cooling down — but never to the extent of other northern regions where the inhabitants are anticipating the arrival of snowflakes and a jocular white bearded gentleman jelly-bellying through their chimneys bearing gifts and goodwill. With these events in mind, we honor the colour white in this edition of the newsletter, and wish you purity and serenity for the month of December. =============== CONTENTS ===============
========== White is Beautiful in Vietnam =========== by Ben Rowse White is beautiful. Or at least it is in Vietnam where skin-whitening creams sell like hot cakes and women wrap themselves up
like mummies whenever they venture outside. Arm-length gloves made of a combination of lycra and cotton are essential accessories
for women across the country as they zip around city streets on their motorbikes. Hat, sunglasses and a colourful handkerchief
tied gangster-style across the face complete an outfit fashioned to beat the skin-browning rays of the tropical sun.
Today, as has been the case for centuries, beauty in the minds of most Vietnamese woman means white skin — a symbol of femininity, pureness, sophistication and high social class. Dark skin, on the other hand, still conjures up images of poverty and peasants toiling in paddy fields, exposed to the unforgiving elements. "I want my skin to be white because I think it is beautiful," said Dang Thi Ngoc Nga, a 31-year-old office worker at a state-run company in Ho Chi Minh City. "But I also want to protect myself from the from the sun and its ultra-violet rays which are dangerous," she added before zooming off on her scooter at a busy intersection in the southern business capital. Since the late 1990s, middle-class women throughout Vietnam have adopted similar protective measures as rising household incomes enable them to spend more time and money on their personal appearance. More recently, government warnings about skin cancer and the exponential rise in pollution levels due to the millions of motorbikes on the roads have further encouraged the trend to cover-up every inch of exposed flesh. But Vietnamese women are not alone in their desire to achieve a perfectly white complexion. Throughout Asia, from Japan to India, pale skin is considered a sign of beauty. Indeed, skin considered too dark can often be enough to derail potential suitors in arranged marriages among middle-class families on the Indian sub-continent. Not surprisingly, beauty salons and companies specialising in skin whitening products enjoy a captive and lucrative market. Kim Loan, director of the Japanese-owned Chao Spa salon in Ho Chi Minh City, says the desire for white skin has yet to be affected by the country's rapid exposure to western culture and fashions. "In Europe and other western countries, tanned skin is considered healthy, beautiful and a sign of expensive living, but here most people still want to have white skin," she said. Even for those fortunate enough to have access to a swimming pool, heat-relieving dips are unthinkable until the sun has begun its late afternoon descent. There are, however, signs of change. In trendy cafes and bars in Vietnam's fashion-setting metropolis, some women are turning heads with their dyed blonde hair, and golden tans. Tran My Hanh, a 24-year-old amateur model and fashion shop owner, recently died her hair back to a more conservative brown colour from a daring honey blonde. But her skin remains tanned. "We women all like to have a fair complexion, and that in Vietnam means white skin. But these days there are more and more girls with tanned skin like me. It is not because we don't like white skin, but because it is easier to get brown than white," she said. "I had to choose between off-white skin that looked unhealthy and tanned skin which I think looks healthy. I much prefer being tanned." But she concedes there is a fashion statement to be made too. "It is stylish to be different, and besides, Westerners like it - and my boyfriend doesn't mind it, either."
======== Our artist of the month: Manh Phu =======  Manh Phu - Vietnamese Girls - $200
Manh Phu - Vietnamese Girls - $200 Click to see more paintings by this artist. ======= In the Country of Water and White Lizards ======= This poem has been translated from the original French by Catherine Wieder. It was first published in Hanoï by Nhà xuât bàn Thanh Niên. Thanh Niên's words evoke vividly the feeling of Vietnam. Anyone who has visited will feel within the phrases a sense of returning to the sensory events that make Vietnam so compelling; and anyone yet to visit will no doubt feel more closely the need to see and feel the everyday beauty of this country, where the exotic is the everyday - and the white lizards shriek like birds. Here is the country of water and white lizards of ventilators and motorcycles. People ride two by two, clinging one to the other, on small motorscooters. Now and then, I saw a whole family, father, mother and two children, riding on the same machine, looking as quiet and pleasant, as if they were in a first class compartment. What's the use of a car when the air is so mild? Young girls wander along, their chins over the drivers' shoulders, watching the road, with the same eyes as his, or else sitting side-saddled, hardly resting on the skaï of the saddle, with a graceful balance, as allowed by their everlasting lightness of their being forever 16. Some drive, wearing gloves. Hence, living seems to be a matter of meticulousness. In every possible pitch, horns echo, here I come, here I am, give me way. But they seem to have much pleasure to insist that they only wish to add their shrill note to the frenzied cacophony of tears. Both hooter and helm, the horn curves paths and trails. They don't stop, they slow down a little, meander, tack, skim, shirk. Lissomness eschews clinks. Nothing head-on, everything curves skids, slants. One anticipates, one is never caught off one's guard, one joins in, one leaps onto the rythm, 37-38 kms an hour, one models one's speed on to the temperature of the air. Now and then a glance, a smile, some kind of love-making, very quickly, with your eyes only. The street has its smells, its humours, its smugginesses, its wrinkles and its wounds. River or rice-field, now it spreads, entrenches itself, sets up its camp, with its stalls, its canvasses of merchants crouching. 98°-100°F. the temperature of the air resembles that of the heart. Why so much hurly-burly, why so much urge? one pulls one's life, one loads it or unloads it, one drops it, one heaves it, one balances it, one shifts it, one is aware of the burdens and the efforts. Yet living doesn't seem to weigh upon them when they remain sitting quietly, on their doorsteps. People, here, seem to be waiting for nothing but for the present. Here it is, there it comes, never repeats itself, takes its roots, stretches itself, looks like eternity. When the sun goes down, in the little shop, the owner puts away his motorbike, lying on a camp bed or crouching right on the tiled floor, they watch TV, stripped to the waste, idly, or else, two or three of them gather on the threshhold or on the on the pavement nibbling at some food, next to a candle, in the thickness and the mugginess of night which its warm dampness seems to turn even blacker. Sometimes too, people go for a walk, along the side of the lake with the lovers, the clusters of children, and old men wearing pijamas among the tireless crickets of the flamboyants. Outside the town, the town, the road and the motor way remember dirt tracks with holes, muds, puddles, interruptions, ruts, loose stones, hay-stasks, now higgedly-piggledy, drying, flat on verges. Sometimes uneven roadways are entirely covered with straw, now piled up, turned over, now meant to dry, or in sheaves, hence spread in long golden pavements where hens come and peck. Thus the countryside pushes away the town or, rather, stands up to it, relentlessly following its own pace, carrying its bundles, pulling its buffaloes, or pushing its herds and ducks, amid the mopeds and trucks. Where the market stands, the street itself goes back to the earth, with its vegetables and fruits, one would think they grew on the spot, rather than come from the villages. It becomes a swamp with its fishes, or a field with its peasants wearing a lamp-shade made of straw on their heads, and who, too, seem just risen from the earth with their cones, their buckets and their hoists. Here too the contemporary becomes a building site but people work there with ageless faces and tools. Only very few machines, here the world is hand made. Water-lilies, duckweeds, lotus flowers and rice bunches. Here grass grows in the water. Truly, in this country, people don't really live on earth, but on the surface of the liquid thin layer covering it and permeating it. One doesn't even know either whether one one is either in town or in the countryside, since water, with its grass, comes so close to the houses. Water is called homeland, hence, may be, the taste for xylophones, for wet arpeggios and shrill tunes where the rain is heard falling. The thick and damp monsoon rain brings with new $1 hues, the green, blue, pink, yellow and purple of large plastic raincoats both monochromatic and transparent in which one wraps oneself to pedal. Looking askance, faking the hippo, two buffaloes under water up to the eyes swim in the ditch on the surface of grey waters. Annam, Annamite, Tonkin, Indochina, Cochinchina, Viet-Nam, how many names does this country have? Lets repeat what Tardieu wrote about Tonkin: "indifferenciation and everlasting abrupt change of subject", this country is a poem. I never stop taking one thing for another. That white lizard, for example, shrieking like a bird, perched on the bedroom's white wall; that blade of grass whom I don't know whether it's either meadow or swamp, and all these ghost cyclists with bandit-scarves over their noses letting only two black eyes be seen behind the mask of white linen covering their skin from the sun. Most of them wear a fluid blouse and wide trousers, very few dresses; they wouldn't be practical enough either to pedal or to work, few breasts, few hips, their outlines are hardly different from those of boys. When they are not made of perfectly white linen, their blouses are drawn with thin stripes or light green, or brown squares: here again, the earth has its word to say, here its hues, its lines dress the people all the way to the town. What a weird sight: those creatures tapering their head-tip into a point, cone-shaped heads, whether they carry hoists, draw carts, or pedal under the rain. That straw lamp-shade makes them look either childish or floral. Here are almost cabalistic figures, it's all grist to their mill, their bodies pointed towards the sky, or bent towards the ground, they are the language of the landscape, its means of signalling, its roofs and its moving church-towers. Would anyone image such a hat on the head of a Texan or Caucasian giant? What makes it so moving is surely the way it fits thin bodies and concludes them by almost hiding both their necks and shoulders. The woman carrying her hoist is a pendulum whose conical hat becomes the needle. Clutches of tmbstones among the fields The dead feed the quick. They are here, so close. They keep a watchful eye on both grass and plentiful rice, they share with you both food and sleep. They are offered bundles of red notes, card-board houses, paper sandals, a camera, a fake TV, a ventilator, to take a breath of cool air, a motorbike or a bike, a watch to be able to tell you the time in eternity. For them, people create a mock universe, a kind of red and golden poem enclosed in the big box, red and golden too, that gathers their remains. Words are like poems, their lives are made of paper. Lets imagine a new town thus made up: two or three green lakes, a grey cathedral, a few golden and crimson pagodas, and so many streets: Buttons St.? Zip St., Wool ball St., Exhaust pipe St., Hub-cap St., Offerings for dead people St., Sandals St., Children's toys and copy-books' St., Locks and keys' St., Bear cubs and bra-cups' St., Zinc and tin St., Electricity St., Hammer and sickle St., Quartz watches' St., Suits' St., Motorbikes' St., and the motorbikes of the street, the motorbikes of all streets, the street that begins and ends nowhere, the street that crosses the world.  Nguyen Nguyen - "Fishing 10" - $500 - more >> ========= Featured Pieces ========= The following four works by Nguyen Duy Nhi showcase his ease with a sensuous duality of richness and simplicity. Using lush, fauvist colours to adorn the surroundings of the women in the paintings, Duy Nhi successfully showcases their beauty within the rhythm of everyday events.  Nguyen Duy Nhi - "Beauty Four" - $130 - more >>  Nguyen Duy Nhi - "Yellow Flower My Heart" - $130 - more >>  Nguyen Duy Nhi - "Girl with Kitten" - $130 - more >>  Nguyen Duy Nhi - "I Wish It Were My Cat" - $130 - more >> Minh Phuong's Country Girl 4 delights the eye with the arcs of the subject's graceful form — emerging from demure shadow, minh captures a fleeting moment of the divine.  Minh Phuong - "Country girl 4" - $130 - more >> ============== Artist Roster ============== Our database of up-and-coming artists has doubled in the last few months and we now have over 750 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.
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