Vietnamese Art in the 21st century
Nora Taylor

In 1986, when the Vietnamese government officially announced its plan to institute economic reforms, otherwise known as Doi Moi, the international art world had still no knowledge of the art trends within Vietnam. Now, over 20 years later, not only are there art galleries exhibiting Vietnamese art all over the world, but there is a general assumption that the economic policy of Doi Moi and art go hand in hand. Many of these assumptions were made at the time the first exhibition of contemporary art outside of Vietnam since 1975, took place at Plum Blossoms Gallery in Hong Kong in 1991. That exhibition, entitled “Uncorked Soul,” was built on the premise that decades of socialism had repressed creativity and that, thanks to Doi Moi, artists were now free.
The exhibition currently on display at the Singapore Art Museum, “Post-Doi Moi: Vietnamese Art After 1990” takes the premise further in displaying a wide selection of artists from both the so-called Doi Moi period of the early 1990s and bringing it up to date to the early 21st century. While the term Doi Moi has been understood for several decades as a policy of reform that has infiltrated all sectors of society, social, political and economic, it is less clear what Post-Doi Moi means. That term is used somewhat loosely in the exhibition to signify the decades since 1990, but it is interesting to reflect on how far Vietnamese art has come since those early exhibitions in the 1990s and perhaps the “Post” in “Post-Doi Moi” really means that Vietnamese contemporary art has moved far beyond the simple allegory of post-socialist creative freedom.

Post Doi-Moi and Vietnam today
In this way, the ambitious exhibition presented by the Singapore Art Museum, that opened on May 12 and will remain on view until September 28, 2008, is far more complex than its title suggests. The show is less about Doi Moi per se and much more about individual artists working in Vietnam today and their own impulses, identities, trajectories, styles and relationships to one another. The show does not try to narrow the definition of Vietnamese art to any single adjective or characteristic, rather, it succeeds in displaying the sheer variety of artistic expressions available to artists in that country. Furthermore, far from being a random selection of what’s what and who’s who in the Vietnamese art world, the show consciously attempts to make sense of the historical breakthrough presented by the onset of Doi Moi while at the same time highlighting how far some artists have pushed the vocabulary of Vietnamese art over the past two decades. For example, whereas an artist such as Dang Xuan Hoa, who was the star among promising young artists at the time of the “Uncorked Soul” exhibit and built his reputation on colorful expressionist still life paintings in the 1990s, his work in the Post-Doi Moi exhibition takes on a different meaning when he it is exhibited alongside Vuong Van Thao’s “Living Fossils,” a 2006 installation of miniature ceramic houses encased in acrylic blocks as if relics from a prehistoric age. Indeed, it might be the juxtaposition of works from the 1990s with works from the early 21st century that gives clues to the viewer of how transformative these past two decades have been in the mindset, attitudes, education and ideas of the entire Vietnamese population.
I am not new to Vietnamese art. As a scholar and researcher of Vietnamese art since the 1990s, I do not view this exhibition as an introduction to the art of the region nor can I speak for an audience who would be discovering Vietnamese contemporary art for the first time. I consider this show however to succeed in appealing to both the connoisseurs and the amateurs of Vietnamese art. Whereas the several “survey” type shows of Vietnamese art that I have seen over the past decade have been a showcase of famous names and a display of stereotypically “Vietnamese” landscapes and cultural icons, this show managed to exhibit well known artists next to lesser known ones and I found myself not so much running down the checklist of famous Vietnamese artists than actually looking at the art. Each piece manages to stand on its own and would do fine in any show of contemporary art without the label “Vietnamese.” This is particularly the case with such works as Vu Dan Tan’s cardboard costumes, Rich Streitmatter-Tran’s video installation “Waiting” and the above mentioned Vuong Van Thao piece. I have always been weary of exhibitions that attempt to reduce art to a single idea, region, nationality or culture. This show is about quality works regardless of where they are from. Still, they have been brought together for a common reason, and one cannot completely disassociate them from their country of origin but they do present the viewer with a far more complex and varied idea of what Vietnam, or Vietnamese art is and has been since Doi Moi, than it would have had this show followed some of the more typical definitions of Vietnam as a serene and traditional culture. Part of the reason is the curatorial effort that has gone into the show to avoid pitfalls, but also because of Singapore’s relationship to Vietnam as a neighbor and for whom Vietnam is an economic partner and not simply an exotic and distant land open for tourism.

SAM and Contemporary Vietnamese Art
One aspect of the exhibition that is worth noting, and that is largely underplayed by the curators, is the Singapore Art Museum’s own role in the development of Vietnamese contemporary art. In the mid-1990s, after the establishment of the Singapore Art Museum, two young curators traveled to Vietnam to look at the art scene. Armed with a generous budget, these curators were not afraid to trust their own intuitions and make serious purchases on behalf of the museum. At that time, I was in Vietnam myself conducting research on Vietnamese modern art for my doctoral dissertation. I met with these curators and was impressed by their eye. Having no prior knowledge of Vietnamese art, they nonetheless managed to do their homework, interview artists, visit studios and read as much as they could from the available literature. What took me years to study, they learned in a few months and their acquisitions had a lasting impact on the international art community’s perception of Vietnamese and its willingness to take Vietnamese artists seriously. The Singapore Art Museum was one of the first major world museums to acquire Vietnamese contemporary art.
This made a strong impression on local artists’ self-esteem and their sense of place in the world. This exhibition could have glorified the museum’s role and made much more of a conscious effort to place value on those early purchases. I greatly admire their modesty. They put the art and the artists first. Perhaps, there will be Vietnamese art experts, such as myself, who know about these early purchases and will surely, as I did, look at the dates of acquisitions and art works on display and notice the discrepancies between a Tran Luong, for example, from 1994 and a Nguyen Van Cuong from 2003. Not for any difference in the artistic qualities of the works but for the historic importance of the 1990s work. The market place has risen to such heights over the past ten years that many of the 1990s paintings are impossible to find, having been lost to some lucky tourist who bought it in one of the early galleries for a song.
We are fortunate, therefore, to have the Singapore Art Museum’s collection of 1990s paintings. When I look at some of the paintings from that period, having not seen some of them since they were made, I realize what an extraordinary period the 1990s was in Vietnam. More importantly, the Singapore Art Museum’s collection captures some of the genuine sentiments of the Vietnamese population at large not AFTER Doi Moi but before. A painting such as Do Son’s painting showing a mother grieving in front of her family’s altar, a pot with sticks of burning incense shines onto the photographs of perhaps her fallen son, a soldier. That painting captures the sentiments of the post-war period. That period has receded into the distance as Vietnam has entered an age of globalization. But it is worth remembering how recent it was. Post-Doi Moi does not mean that we have moved beyond Doi Moi any more than Post-War means that Vietnamese citizens forgot the war or ever could. This exhibition, while making no claims to the politics of history, very subtly, is a homage to the survival and creativity of the Vietnamese in the face of adversity and loss.
The contribution of the Singapore Art Museum for the survival and preservation of Vietnamese art is much greater than this exhibition claims. One hopes, therefore, that this show is only one of a series of exhibitions that reflect on history rather than following market trends and pursuing the latest fashion whims of the art world. The 1990s were a rich and fruitful period for Vietnamese artists and it is important for them too to remember how they have come as a nation and learn what they can do to preserve their own artistic heritage and nurture its own contemporary art practices.