Locating Vietnamese contemporary art scene An ethnographic Hong-Ngoc TRIEU attempt from afar TRI14437741 Abstract. Initially, as a student majored in Design Cultures, I was intrigued in Vietnam precisely because I barely knew anything about the art history of my country. Having exposed to the studies of Design Cultures and Histories, I set out to fnd how Vietnamese art history is chronicled by putting it in a complex relationship with the sociocultural and political background. Identifying and locating art from a place like Vietnam that rarely fgures in art history cannot be done overnight as I am thousand miles away from the happenings. This essay, thus, is my humble attempt to look at Vietnam’s contemporary art scene through an afar-ethnographic approach mainly by fexible design methods such as interview, survey, case study, discourse analysis and participant observation. Given how little experience in the real-world research and history learning that I possess, my fndings are based on personal analysis, percep-on and hence, do not necessarily reflect other’s views on the same topic. Entrance to contemporary art scene: tracing the Vietnamese art history In order to investigate the Vietnamese reform in 1986, where restriction on contemporary art scene, I am essentially artistic creativity were steadily relaxed asking the question of how it is and hence allowed artist greater freedom constructed and perceived within the art of expression and facilitating exposure to community and the stream of Vietnamese contemporary trends in both Asian and history of art. While world contemporary Western art. However, unlike the world art had started and risen to prominence contemporary art with its rich outline of since the 1950s - 1960s, its Vietnamese artistic movements in term of quantity, counterpart only came into existence in the diversity and quality, Vietnamese latter decades of the twentieth century; contemporary art scene has barely seen therefore, it is relatively new to the public. any signifcant evolution and only In defning ‘contemporary art’, portrait presented to the public through a limited artist, educator Shelly Esaak sees amount of exhibitions such as: abstract ‘contemporary art’ as the art produced in and semi-abstract paintings, performance the current period of time, which is, in arts and just recently, experimental sound other word, ‘contemporary’ to us. Since and video art. ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ are synonyms in vernacular English, it is In order to clarity the midst casting over important for artist not to confate the the public’s familiarity of contemporary terms of ‘modern art’ and ‘contemporary art, a small survey has been carried out art’. According to art historian Nora A. among a group of Vietnamese young Taylor, who has been researching about adults from 18 to 30 years of age to Vietnam history of art in the last 20 years, examine their understanding of this contemporary art in Vietnam is often emerging art form. associated with “the 1990s surge in sales of painting and the proliferation” of commercial galleries in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. This can be seen as a result of the art Pie 1. Do you know what ‘contemporary art’ is? 27% Yes No 63% 10% Limited Knowledge The surveys generated 100 individual participants, whom mostly are actively engaged in social and art related activities in a two-week period. In general perspective, it can be inferred that most of them have little knowledge about contemporary art. In addition, one- tenth of they surveyed have never heard of contemporary art before. However, the difference between the answer of yes and no is almost threefold. For those who have known or had little knowledge of the subject, when being asked, admitted that they were fairly new to this contemporary art hence found it ‘hard to understand’, ‘not aesthetic pleasant’ and most of all, ‘felt no related’ to the themes of the show. The process of asking for the public’s general opinions simply tells something about the way Vietnamese artists approach contemporary art and their relationship with the audiences. Despite being interest in arts from an early age, it wasn’t until I set about to gain more knowledge of contemporary art that I was confronted with the reality of how Vietnamese art history was written. “Although alive and well in artists’ studios, there was little Vietnamese art to be found in museums and archives” (Nora, 2005). As Brian Swafford suggested in his “Critical Ethnography: The Comics Shop as Cultural Clubhouse” essay, ethnographic research allows resereacher to “observe the everyday experiences of a particular location” in order to achieve a “refective style of thinking about relationship between society, knowledge, and social power structures”, it seems to me that despite living in a foreign country, I had little choice but to resort to what I call a long-distance ethnographic approach to my topic. Although this may sound like a daunting task, I found that being away from from home actually opened up new perspectives. First of all, studying arts abroad has given me a more objective and broader outlook at the subject. As Becker Howard reminded us in his “The Epistemology of Qualitative Research” paper, “it is inevitably epistemologically dangerous to guess at what could be observed directly. The danger is that we will guess wrong, that what looks reasonable to us will not be what looked reasonable to those whom we research”. Secondly, I hardly found any diffculty in accessing reference documents while evidences are needed to back up for a thesis or an assumption. On the other hand, it might be a real obstacle for carrying out research in Vietnam due to the lack of foreign language books and arts discourses. So far, the distance has helped me maintain novelty in my feld setting, though elements of conducting research from afar make it quite risky. Development of Vietnamese Contemporary Art: Why haven’t you known about it? In essence, in central to the ethnographic social anthropology professor at method lies the use of participant University of Oslo, listing in his book observation, formal and casual “Ethnicity and Nationalism: interviews and questionnaires (Jeffrey, Anthropological Perspectives” a number 2012). However, before I elaborate of criteria and mutual contact commonly further, it has to be made clear how used by anthropologists to identify and “Hanoi-centered Vietnamese art history demarcate one ethnical group to another, was” (Nora, 2005) as Hanoi is such as language, political organization considered to be the cultural center of and territorial contiguity. To start with, all Vietnam, which hosts more cultural sites of the interviewees are employed within than any other city in more than 1000 the local creative outlets and the years of history. However, the Vietnamese contemporary art scene that geographic split between the north and had evolved around them. At the same the south does not mean equal time, they all seemed to share a great distribution among artists’ community and ambition for the development of the their notions of Vietnamese art (Nora, topic, and more or less, epitomized the 2005). With this in mind, I attempted to components needed to form a replica of bring about the long-distance the Vietnamese art society. The analysis ethnography of Vietnamese of fve transcribed in-depth interviews contemporary art by inviting fve people reveals the main obstacles in the who are currently working and living in development of Vietnamese Hanoi for virtual and email interview contemporary art, regarding the social, sessions. Why is it appropriate to cultural and political context. describe them as an ethnic group or a certain kind of people? In answering this question, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a Lack of Contemporary Art Education Having been born and raised in Vietnam, it came to me that there is hitherto no contemporary art center, institution or museum whatsoever. According to Nguyen Mai Phuong, a recent art graduate of Vietnamese University of Fine Arts (successor of the Indochina College of Fine Arts), the curriculum at her school focuses ‘exclusively’ on traditional form such as drawings, paintings, sculptures and usually bypasses critical theory and foundation for contemporary art. This, undoubtedly, has been a major disadvantage for Vietnamese contemporary artists who are earnest about developing their practices. The recent breakdown of the crowfunding of “The Black Hole”, a book adopted from the virtual participatory art project with the same name has been an obvious consequence. “The Black Hole”, inspired by “Postsecret”, an ongoing community mail art project by Frank Warren, is where people can submit their secrets anonymously for Nguyen Hoang Giang, the owner of the project, to illustrate and publish it on Tumblr and Facebook. The project facilitates conversations between people about taboos and controversies in Vietnam such as sex abuse, incest, adultery and many other issues dealing with human conditions. It has been running for over a year, featuring more than 120 illustrations, 2000 secrets and attracting more than 45.000 followers on each social network. The purpose of transforming “The Black Hole”, from a virtual project to a physical object, as Giang pointed out, was simply to create a dialogue between the art and its audience and at the same time, attract the social compassion toward the vulnerable. Despite the traffc on both sites, “The Black Hole” publishing faced a protest of thousands and latter deliberately withdrew by the artist. During the Skype-interview, Giang shared his experiences: Interviewer: Do you fnd any diffculty in managing “The Black Hole”? Giang: After the breakdown of the publishing, I have realized that I have not done a proper job as an artist. I have not stated the purpose clearly enough, which led to a misunderstanding for the participants. Without the support of a proper managing system, curator, lawyer, media analyzer, I found it very diffcult to run the project all by myself.