For a recent show at Emasi Nam Long, a gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, the curator installed an overhead track on which a small spotlight moved back and forth as it traversed the space, like how police in helicopters search for suspected criminals at night, or how the crews of U.S. “Huey” helicopters, for a short time, used spotlights to seek out the Vietcong in darkness during the American War.
The curator, Hanoi-based Vân Đỗ, wrote that “the focus has shifted from the production of new works. Instead, there is growing interest in efforts to record, revisit, write and rewrite history.” For example, Forefinger (2021), by Trần Tuấn, is a cassock-size sculpture of the trigger digit of a hand, covered with retrieved and blank dog tags. Like many of his peers, Tuấn is an activist concerned with promoting art to a wider community. His artist’s statement refers to his father and uncles, who cut off their forefingers to avoid conscription during the war.
The catalog for the exhibition, titled White Noise, states that Tuấn’s works are often inserted into public spaces and are prompted by his desire to open dialogues on topics ranging from history to present affairs. The verb insert points to the renegade character of placement that often is a necessity for public art.
Vietnam is where I first witnessed one of the major themes of this new century: the minds and hearts of a rising populace can be satiated and controlled if one pins them under a continuously toppling wall of consumer goods. Transparency of government workings, free flow of information, freedom of expression, and access to challenging works of aesthetic complexity are all things the Vietnamese government has a history of suppressing (much like China and a number of Southeast Asian countries).
There have always been hurdles to being an artist here, but as Vietnam’s relationship with the United States has shifted from hostility to economic interdependence, the dominating Communist Party has dropped the pretense of tolerating art that poses questions that should not be asked. Among the generation of artists, writers, and gallerists who are now midcareer and who have attained international stature are several Californian diasporans. These individuals have developed a radicalized practice through their exposure to the pedagogy of the Golden State’s art schools.
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
I’m here on my sixth visit since 2002. In 2006 and ’07, I lived in Vietnam and in Cambodia as a Fulbright Fellow in journalism. At that time, I participated in what was meant to be an artist-organized exhibition, Saigon Open City, an ambitious kind of regional biennial formed in the absence of any government cultural infrastructure. It failed when it became apparent that the Ministry of Culture was never going to allow it to fully open. Since then, artists have pushed on despite varying degrees of harassment. The German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin once expressed that history is written by the victors and should be written by the vanquished. But here in Vietnam—ultimately victorious, as the citizenry will attest, over the French, the Americans, and the Chinese—they have vanquished their own artists. And yet it is the artists who persist in making works that are a form of service, writing the suppressed history of Vietnam and exposing its present corruption.
The patriotism of the Vietnamese people that many of us are old enough to remember from the 1960s remains in its artists.
HOME IS WHERE THE ART IS
I visit Richard Streitmatter-Tran where he lives with his young family in the far reaches of District 7, about a half hour from downtown Ho Chi Minh City. The route there passes through a two-lane, truck-choked industrial corridor that serves the enormous shipping container port on the Saigon River. It leads eventually onto wider streets bordered by very recently built high-end malls, apartment buildings, golf courses, and parks and, beyond those, to his suburban neighborhood.
Streitmatter-Tran, like many of his artist colleagues of his generation, was born in Vietnam but raised elsewhere. He attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has a U.S. passport. In addition to making art, he has run alternative art spaces—most notably, Dia Projects, which began in 2010 and for a number of years mounted exhibits in a building on the still intermittently elegant Đồng Khởi Street in downtown Saigon. Streitmatter-Tran now operates Dia Projects out of his studio. He tells me that unlike in earlier times, contemporary Vietnamese art is being collected by a rising moneyed class within the country, and exhibition spaces are being privately funded.
For a seven-year period—starting in 2005—every application to exhibit his work in the country was rejected. Talking about current censorship, he says that officialdom is still sensitive to political and ecological themes in artworks but has lightened up on sexual and religious imagery. “But one has to be aware.… The censors aren’t stupid.”
Many of the most prominent artists of the emerging generation are women who appeared with the contemporary art historian Pamela Nguyen Corey in July 2022 on the online series The New Social Environment, produced by the art publication the Brooklyn Rail. (The Rail was cofounded and continues to be published by Phong Bui, who was born in 1964 in Huế, Vietnam.)
I catch up with Corey in the burgeoning District 2, an expat-dominated bedroom community. She is the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia, a recently published look at contemporary art of the region in relation to the city as signscape, an environment of messages and portents. She teaches, along with Streitmatter-Tran, at Fulbright University Vietnam. Corey is of Vietnamese and American heritage. She did undergraduate work in studio art at UC Irvine before turning to history of art and visual studies at Cornell. I ask her about the influence of Southern California’s art departments on some of the most prominent diasporan artists, and she notes that at the time she was at Irvine, a good portion of the faculty had recently graduated from California Institute of the Arts and were very political.
I arrange to see Dinh Q. Lê, whom I met during my Fulbright fellowship and when he was helping organize Saigon Open City. He had left Hà Tiên while still a boy, after the border incursions by Cambodia. I remember Lê telling me how he gripped his mother’s hand as they were led through water to a small boat. His mother dealt in jewelry, and all their worldly possessions were in a bag in her other hand. During my visit, I note Lê’s undiminished energy and curiosity. But tragically and without warning, he would die of a stroke a few months after I meet with him.
When Lê was 10, he and his family arrived in Simi Valley, and after high school, he attended UC Santa Barbara. There he studied with the artist Ann Hamilton, who was in the forefront of installation art using traditional household crafts, like stitching and embroidery, as metaphorical and analogical tools, and with Richard Ross, a photographer who saw his work as a method for social action and documentary. Lê, who considered himself “essentially a collagist,” said that the Dada works available at the university’s library—including those of the German post–World War I protest artists Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield—were of foundational importance to him.
Today, Lê is revered as an important international artist. At New York’s Asia Society, in the mid-2000s, he showed an extensive patchwork of vintage photographs sourced from a Saigon used bookshop (one I recalled visiting when it was still in existence on Đồng Khởi) as well as acclaimed early work: an extensive series titled From Vietnam to Hollywood, in which he used a straw mat–weaving method, taught to him by an aunt, to combine images from American films about the war in Vietnam with documentary photography from that period or, in other examples, images of Cambodian victims of the Khmer Rouge interlaced with details of Angkor Wat. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010, he showed a once-working helicopter built from odds and ends by two Vietnamese farmers, accompanied by a film that intercut scenes from movies and news footage of the American War, dominated as it was by choppers, with testaments from survivors of it. Among other layers of irony, this homemade version made oblique reference to the Arthur Young–designed Bell-47D1 helicopter that is famously displayed in midair in the permanent collection of the museum’s design department.
Lê was the cofounder and chair of Sán Art, an independent arts organization. It has a history of offering residencies and curatorial training and maintains a library stocked with criticism and theory, much of it brought from abroad in artists’ personal luggage to skirt censorship. Lê explained that while some private organizations try to avoid censors, Sán Art has always sought approval from the Ministry of Culture before each exhibition. He said the strategy is one where the idea is to get the censors “used to the art.”
Sán Art is located in an office building in District 4, just south of the city center, in a raw space with a ceiling height of about 14 feet. Inside, The Disoriented Garden… A Breath of Dream, by Trương Công Tùng, is on display. Situated in semidarkness, the installation is a Gesamtkunstwerk that has a film element, a music soundtrack, a collection of ceramic pottery, tubes, flowing water, a shallow trench dug into the cement flooring, a narrow carpet of beading slumped over an assemblage of plants and machinery, soil, and stone, with a series of lacquer paintings by the artist hung on the gallery walls. Many of these materials are reused as the venues for Tùng’s artworks change; his themes are based on the culture and ecologies of Vietnam’s Central Highlands, home to more than 30 ethnic groups. The region sustained damage from carpet bombing and defoliation during the American War and, later, suffered exploitative agricultural schemes. Images in the hour-long filmed component include scurrying insects before a full moon, accompanied by flute music. A figure outfitted as a vagabond character passes through the film at moments, symbolizing the many disenfranchised survivors of the war who continue to populate the Central Highlands. The accompanying literature states that Tùng sees the artist as a vessel “through which voiceless beings express themselves.” It is a soothing, alluring, mysterious installation that exemplifies the combination of poetic and political characteristics often found in contemporary Vietnamese art.
THE RETURNING DIASPORA
Another artist who migrated to California by boat during the diaspora is Tuan Andrew Nguyen. He left at age three and was first in Texas, then joined the Vietnamese expat community in Long Beach before moving to Irvine, where his family lived with two others in a two-bedroom apartment.
Nguyen returned to Vietnam in 2005 after majoring in fine arts at UC Irvine and later completing his MFA at CalArts. At Irvine, he was influenced by Daniel Martinez, a social provocateur across mediums, and Andrea Bowers, a painter and activist. At CalArts, he studied under Michael Asher, whose post-studio classes were famous for their umpteen-hours-long critiques that would pull apart all material and associational supports, and under Sam Durant, perhaps best known for a group of sculptures reproducing 30 monuments to those killed during multiple so-called Indian Wars—Indigenous peoples and white settlers—located around the United States and all conforming to the same obelisk shape as the Washington Monument. A year after his return to Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen described the situation in a statement accompanying his project Proposals for a Vietnamese Landscape:
Vietnam is a paradox in its political operation and its economic progression. Theoretically, government censorship reigns supreme over the landscape. But even that’s at odds with the reality. Trends that are becoming popular with Vietnamese youth culture, like hip-hop, are deemed as western influences and warned against, sometimes outwardly censored, by the government. All the while, advertising agencies pay big money to exploit and use these same trends to sell consumer goods in their marketing campaigns.
Last August, he had a well-received exhibition at the New Museum in New York City. Nguyen is recognized for his work with the Propeller Group (helicopters again) artist collective and for his films, collaborative paintings, and sculptural objects, many of which, like those of his teacher Durant, use the concept of the monument. Enemy’s Enemy: Monument to a Monument (2012), for example, is a Louisville Slugger baseball bat carved into the image of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who immolated himself in 1963 in protest of the Vietnamese government’s repression of his faith.
Nguyen is represented in Vietnam by Quỳnh Phạm, director of Galerie Quynh in Ho Chi Minh City. Phạm returned to Vietnam in 1997, having left Da Nang as a child, fleeing on a boat by way of Vung Tau and eventually being rescued by an American ship. She feared water for a long time afterward, she says. Her father was a South Vietnamese fighter pilot whom she only met much later in life; he had, apparently, another family elsewhere. She was initially in a refugee camp with her other family members, then spent time in Guam and Camp Pendleton before settling in Chula Vista.
While in high school, she came across The Arrest of Christ, a Northern Renaissance painting credited to the Workshop of Hieronymus Bosch, at the San Diego Museum of Art. She was moved, began to study art, and became an assistant to the school’s art teacher. She studied art history at UC San Diego, volunteered at the Quint Gallery in La Jolla, excelled as an intern at the Smithsonian, then returned west to work as the only nonwhite staffer in the development department at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla. There, she would buck the hierarchy at the museum and go fishing at lunchtime with the gardener.
After Phạm came back to Vietnam, she began writing for Asian Art News and curating exhibitions. Soon, with aid from her husband, she wrote a cogent business plan, secured backers, and opened her own gallery. She still represents several of the painters she met upon returning, including Tran Van Thao, one of the Group of 10 artists, known for being the first abstract painters in Vietnam.
Phạm’s experience with art institutions in the United States prepared her for “doing everyone’s job” at her own gallery. Her business functions as a for-profit entity while also operating as a promotional and educational extension. She’s moved the gallery several times, and the current location is the most ambitious yet, with four floors of galleries, offices, and temperature-regulated storage and a shaft that runs through the building with a winch for moving large sculptures.
PATRIOT GAMES
I had not been to Hanoi since 2007, and the city doesn’t appear to have changed much except for the traffic pattern. Lines of cars and motorbikes that previously encircled legendary Hoàn Kiếm Lake, a symbol of national pride and of the former imperial seat, have been redirected to the perimeters to accommodate tourism. Many surrounding tree-lined streets seem to have benefited from the rerouting.
I’ve come expressly to see Tran Luong, whom I met on my first visit 22 years ago. Since his beginnings in the meteoric group of painters known as the Gang of Five, he has always been in the forefront of postwar Vietnamese art. In many ways, his career is a pursuit of the social ideal of being an artist: “keeping a distance from object art,” he says, while drawing on the principles of kung fu, “making sure there is an accent on craftsmanship.”
As a child, Tran was sent to the country, as most children in Hanoi were, during the American bombings. While traveling abroad during the mid-1990s, he was exposed to pop art and abstract expressionism, finding the idea of revolution in Jackson Pollock.
Tran stages creative actions to reach people who—owing to poverty or simply being uninformed—would never think of entering an art gallery. These creative actions include Moving Forwards and Backwards (2009), in which he invited people to brush their teeth in an outdoor space, first performed in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, near the Tonlé Sap River, and Welts (2007–), in which he asks audience members to take his red scarf and hit his body with as much aggressiveness as they please. In one interview, he said that though there was pain involved, “I feel very happy. Not really happy, but I feel this kind of high, like taking drugs. Because I can feel like the real part of a million people, not just only me anymore.” Closely connected to the Goethe-Institut in Hanoi, Tran learned curation, “bringing the idea of making institutions form political ideals,” and cofounded Nhá Sán Studio, the first nonprofit experimental art space in Vietnam.
As in Ho Chi Minh City, independent arts organizations in Hanoi have begun to receive patronage from the private sector. Tran is the director of Art Patronage & Development, which is supported by UpGen Vietnam, a facilitator space for businesses that provides the group with a studio, learning center, and gallery.
In the APD gallery space is a reprised exhibition from two decades ago, Green Red & Yellow. The show explores Vietnam’s march into economic gain (green), its contradictory Communist program that stops real development of a modern society (red), and the idea of the individual creative element (yellow)—of softness, the free mind, LGBTQ identity, natural roots—that has been left out of the equation. Tran tells me that “20 years later, we are dealing with the same issues; the radical content is still new.” The show was originally held at the Goethe-Institut Hanoi, with 16 artists, and received thousands of visitors in two weeks.
Among the artists I have known, Tran has the most original, most poetic vision. Years ago, I described him in BOMB magazine as “Whitmanesque…the way he unites his personal experiences with nature and national identity.” Soon, Mousse, the important European art publisher, will issue a book on him, and a retrospective of his work will travel to multiple countries.
Tran tells me that he is “not just an artist but an organizer of people; my center is the border between art and society.” Like other contemporary Vietnamese artists, in Ho Chi Minh City as well as here in Hanoi and elsewhere, he is affected by the huge gaps between the rich and poor, his country’s consumerism and corruption, and the ongoing struggle for freedom. But, he says, “I still love living here. I get up and I still have energy.”•
Correction: The print version of this story incorrectly stated that Richard Streitmatter-Trần was banned from exhibiting in Vietnam in response to one of his artworks dealing with ecological harm; his applications to exhibitions were rejected without feedback. We also erred in stating that he went six years without a show in Vietnam; he went seven years without a show in the country.
