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June 2003 Newsletter |
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Welcome to the June 2003 issue of the Vietnam Art Gallery newsletter. This time around we have a beautiful article from Tim Larimer on the simple pleasures that influence the current generation of Vietnamese artists, plus our artist of the month is Hoang Minh. We hope you fall in love with this artist as we have. With over 650 pieces available for order on the site at any time, we're one of the largest Vietnamese art resources on the 'net today. Thanks for your support! ============== Artist of the month: "Hoang Minh" ============== Hoang Minhs strengths are an eye for the abstract, and the ability to create beautiful backdrops with simple washes of colour.  Hoang Minh - "Quiet 1" - $250 We have 78 online right now for you to inspect immediately. ======= Fine Accommodation Available in Ho Chi Minh City =======
============ Fresh, New, Vibrant ============ Another relentless buying spree by Le Giang up in Hanoi has resulted in some wonderful finds. Here are three I thought you may like--click on the painting to see more works by that artist.  Nguyen Nguyen - "Fishing" - $2,000 - more >>  Minh Phuong - "The Bamboo Frame" - $1,000 - more >>  Phu Nhieu - "Moonless Night" - $1,000 - more >> ============== Simple pleasures ============== Their influences are war, poverty and France, but Vietnam's artists are prospering in unexpected ways. A prizewinning painting at a recent Hanoi exhibition appears to be exactly what one might expect from an artist in Vietnam. A splotch of red divides clusters of war implements covered by dirt: guns, fighter jets, knives and barbed wire. A statement about Vietnam's history of warfare and bloodshed? Not exactly. "We suffer a lot of sorrow and pain, and now we don't want to remember that time," says the artist, Do Minh Tam, 33. His inspiration comes not from B-52s, napalm and helicopters swirling above paddy fields--the indelible images from the war fought in the 1960s--but from shops selling toy guns and planes in the economically vibrant Hanoi of the late 1990s. "A little boy shot me with a water pistol, and at first I thought it was just a simple game," says Tam. "But then I think: that game can lead a child to become violent in the future." So his painting, Fossils of Violence, is actually an expression of hope that in the future the toys of war will be buried deep beneath the earth's surface--hence the dirt. Vietnam's artists were themselves hidden away from the rest of the world for years. But as the country's Communist leaders have reformed the economy and opened--haltingly--to outside influences, Vietnamese artists are making a splash on the international art scene. They were among the first of their countrymen allowed to mingle with foreigners during the early days of Hanoi's version of glasnost; today they are among the first beneficiaries of market economics. Works by Bui Xuan Phai, who died in 1988, sold for as little as $100 five years ago; now they command thousands of dollars. A collector in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) sold his first Phai to a foreigner in 1992 for $2,000; he used the money to buy 20 more paintings by the artist for $100 each. Last month he sold one of those to a South Korean collector for $36,000. That's pocket change in the galleries of New York, London and Paris, but in a country like Vietnam, with an annual per capita income of $240, it's a fortune. Living artists are cashing in too. Le Thiet Cuong, 34, whose university art instructors refused to give him paint because they detested his minimalist style, has sold works for as much as $40,000. "Two things happen now," says Cuong. "We can paint freely. And we can sell what we paint." The urban centers of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City bustle with something of an art Renaissance: a rebirth of dollars as well as style. "People see artists like Cuong earn a lot of money, so everybody decides to become a painter," says Bich Ha, a Ho Chi Minh City gallery owner. In at least one case a gallery proprietor did away with the middle man--the artist--and took up painting herself, thus keeping all the profits. So lucrative has the country's art market become that there is a burgeoning trade in forgeries. Nguyen Tu Nghiem, one of the country's most revered artists, says his wife spotted an alleged "Nghiem" for sale at a gallery down the street from his house. "The price was $1,000," says the wife Nguyen Thu Giang. "Everyone knows that is too little for a Nghiem." Says the artist, who is 74: "And the painting was horrible! I am an old man. And I am very tired of having to look at paintings people buy to see if they are really mine. I wish these terrible people would stop copying me!" How did a country as poor and war-ravaged as Vietnam develop such a vibrant art scene? "Part of it is a fad, in the same way that when the Soviet Union opened up, Soviet art became a fad," says C. David Thomas, director of the Indochina Arts Project, who has organized exhibitions of Vietnamese art in the U.S. As Vietnam welcomed foreign investors, it was inevitable that foreign curators, critics and collectors, forever on the lookout for the next big trend, would follow. And many of the country's artists are proving to be no less profit-minded than other Vietnamese. "I worry that the temptations to make money are so great that artists are beginning to mass-produce," says Toh Hock Ghim, Singapore's envoy to Hanoi and an enthusiastic art collector. "In the end that will kill interest in Vietnamese art." But Thomas believes the art will sustain its appeal because of a unique style that results from the twin influences of its Asian traditions and its colonization by Europeans: "It is a wonderful combination of the mystery of Eastern art and the familiarity of Western art." Vietnamese painting owes much to the influence of the French, who in 1925 opened the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine in Hanoi. The institution trained a revolutionary vanguard of urban-minded artists until it was forced to close down during the 1945 Japanese invasion against the French. Many of these artists struggled to find their own voice as they mastered foreign technique. Nghiem, for instance, successfully fused traditional art--carvings from village pagodas, woodblock prints, folk dancers, animals of the lunar calendar--with Western-style painting. Nghiem's influence over later generations of artists is evident. Dang Xuan Hoa, 37, paints in a style reminiscent of Matisse, but he uses such symbols as teacups and folktales, like one about a fish turning into a dragon. "It might appear to be like a Western painting to a foreigner, but a Vietnamese person can see it is Vietnamese," says Hoa, who works in Hanoi. This struggle for a national identity has recently been revived. Painters like Hoa, who says he at first abandoned traditional Vietnamese imagery, are mining their cultural roots. Some young painters even insist on using giay do, Vietnamese paper made from the jute plant. The government's Ministry of Culture and Information, which oversees the arts, is trying to encourage what it calls the "national spirit" with awards and exhibitions for compliant painters and a vigorous propaganda campaign attacking rebellious artists. That is not a popular policy among Vietnam's more independent-minded artists. "It is stupid," says Tran Luong, 37. He produces abstract underwater scenes that on the surface appear to derive little from traditional imagery; yet his paintings were inspired by ponds he explored as a child when his family was evacuated to the countryside to escape the American bombing of Hanoi--a shared experience of northern Vietnamese of his generation. One of the country's most respected painters, Tran Luu Hau, 68, scoffs at the notion of a Vietnamese style. In recent years he has abandoned traditional themes in favor of more abstract work. "When I paint, I am not concerned about national characteristics or identities," he says. "My soul is Vietnamese." Even Nghiem, the role model of many traditional artists, is wary of a cultural mandate. Says he: "Real Vietnamese art is when you find your own style." It is perhaps easier, then, to describe what Vietnamese art is not than to explain what it is. Just as Tam's treatise on violence is not about the Vietnam War, neither do his contemporaries bother much with that fractured period that conjures up such potent images. Given the country's long struggle for independence, the conspicuous aversion to this theme often surprises foreigners. Like Tam, many artists say they are simply tired of the war imagery. Missing as well is anything even vaguely political, with a few exceptions. In part this omission must be attributed to an atmosphere in which artists' paintbrushes have only lately been unfettered from the shackles of government control. Ho Chi Minh in 1945 called for art to depict "the reality of our everyday life." That edict was strictly interpreted for nearly four decades to mean supporting the national cause, be it winning a war or increasing rice production. Ho did not necessarily watch over the easels of artists to see what they painted. But in a poor country the government was the sole supplier of paints and canvas. Those who refused to toe the party line were not allowed to exhibit their work. Phai, for instance, was shunned by the authorities and as a result painted on matchbox covers, cigarette boxes and old newspapers. The government that once made him a pariah celebrates him today as an upholder of the Vietnamese spirit. "Freedom to paint what we want is still something new," says Duong Tuong, a writer and critic. Understandably, caution is a survival skill common among Vietnamese artists. "Those who remember the times when they weren't able to paint what they wanted fear that the repression will come back," says Judith Day, proprietor of a Hong Kong gallery that specializes in Vietnamese art. The artists seem intent on presenting an idealized vision of life, with all the hard edges blunted--even at a time of profound social and economic transformation. It is as if they are immune to the tempestuous world swirling all around them. "This is the shortcoming of today's art," says Tuong. "There is tension in society, but it is not reflected in the work of the artists." "Maybe because they had those controls before," he says, "they want to vent what was restrained for such a long time." That turns out to be not burning political expression but something more benign: flowers, nudes, country pastorals and traditional folklore. "It's a romantic and idealized view of life," says Birgit Hussfeld, a German critic who writes about Vietnamese art. "But it is boring and repetitious." Vietnam's most adventuresome painter today is certainly Truong Tan, 34, whose bold celebrations of his homosexuality have rattled traditionalists. Government censors forced a gallery to take down some of his paintings, which included graphic depictions of men having sex with other men. Artists who want to exhibit overseas must have their works approved by the Ministry of Culture and Information; Tan is apparently the only painter who has been denied. His fellow artists are remarkably unsympathetic. Says one: "The government is right. He should not paint such bad things." Criticism like this only emboldens Tan, who says, "I want to shock people because that is what art should do." It no doubt worries the culture bureaucrats that younger artists are encouraged by Tan. "Truong Tan is our hero," says an art student, 23. One of the country's few prominent female painters, Dinh Y Nhi, 28, paints haunting images of women in grays and blacks, a departure from the more common depiction of slender beauties in flowing ao dai riding bicycles. One of her paintings shows a man with two wives who are fighting with him. Seizing upon the issue of marital infidelity, the recently married Nhi differs from women of her mother's generation in that she will not tolerate a husband's affairs. Her art breaks with conformity as well. "I used to paint in a traditional style, but I felt unhappy with it. It was boring. So I decided to change my style." That attitude may be what makes Vietnamese art more than a simple fad--and saves it from the cultural arbiters and the gallery entrepreneurs who want to dictate what the country's art should be. ============== Artist Roster ============== Our database of up-and-coming artists has doubled in the last few months. 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 with the subject "REMOVE". |
