THE ARTIST IN THE CITY: CONTEMPORARY ART AS URBAN INTERVENTION IN HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM, AND PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Pamela Nguyen Corey August 2015 © 2015 Pamela Nguyen Corey THE ARTIST IN THE CITY: CONTEMPORARY ART AS URBAN INTERVENTION IN HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM, AND PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA Pamela Nguyen Corey, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015 This thesis examines the development of contemporary art in Vietnam and Cambodia by introducing new ways of visually analyzing the city as a site of experience and field of representation. As part of a micro-region loosely referred to as “the Mekong,” named for the river that runs through it, Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh share an intimate geography despite the contentious history their respective nations of Vietnam and Cambodia have experienced for centuries. Pivotal experiences shaping the present in both cities include their colonial pasts as part of French Indochina, postcolonial “golden ages” of independence, and deep imbrication in the wars of the 1960s-70s and traumatic aftermaths including societal upheaval and genocide. New forms of artistic practice and subjectivity began to emerge in the 1990s and became especially pronounced in the first decade of the new millennium, as market-oriented economic reforms in Vietnam and procedures of democratization in Cambodia indexed new relationships to neoliberalism and globalization. While these parallel events guide the comparison of the present, the larger argument is framed by a rigorous engagement with the politics of place and possibilities of built space. As such, I let the detailed stories of two cities relate how artistic practices represent complex affiliations with city and nation, as well as a form of social and creative labor with ties to past forms of modernism. Contemporary art is thus accounted for as a historical episode, a discursive category, and a socio-spatial intervention in the urban and national landscape. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Pamela Nguyen Corey was born on October 1, 1980 in Hong Kong. After spending most of her childhood moving between Asia, Europe, and the United States due to her father’s work for the State Department, her family settled in Laguna Niguel, in southern California. In 2002 she received her B.A. in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, with a minor in Art History. Switching from artistic practice to research and writing, she received a M.A. in Art History from Arizona State University in 2007 and then pursued a Ph.D. in the History of Art at Cornell University, with a focus on Southeast Asian studies and Modern and Contemporary Art. Her dissertation fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh (2010-2012) was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship in addition to grants from the Center for Khmer Studies and Cornell University’s Mario Einaudi Center for International Research and Southeast Asia Program. iii For Holden iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Kaja McGowan, for her patience, support, and illuminating insights not only throughout this project and during my studies of Southeast Asian art, but also for her crucial assistance in helping me manage my larger graduate school experience. I owe so much to her guidance and nurturing presence. I am also deeply thankful for the roles played by my other committee members, Nora Taylor, Iftikhar Dadi, and Stanley O’Connor. Nora Taylor has a been a major source of support and a wonderful conversation companion throughout my incursion into the field of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art history, and I feel extremely fortunate to count her as a friend and mentor in all things. I am also indebted to Iftikhar Dadi’s consistent and critical support throughout the processes of research, writing, and professionalization, and I remain inspired by the ways in which he navigates studies of Asian modernism and comparative studies of modern and contemporary art in a global context. For their insightful and acute suggestions on various chapter drafts of the dissertation and other aspects of my work, I would like to express sincere thanks to Ashley Thompson and Lorraine Paterson. Finally, I continue to be in awe of the imaginative and profound thinking of Stanley J. O’Connor, a pioneer in the field of Southeast Asian art history, whose deceptively straightforward questions continue to resonate in my thinking and the shaping of my work. In its preliminary stages this project was supported by various grants and institutions. Its seeds took place during the Historical Photographs of Cambodia project, funded by Arizona State University Libraries and the Northern Illinois University Southeast Asia Digital Library project. Language training was supported by SEASSI Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships and academic-year FLAS fellowships provided by Cornell University. Pre-fieldwork v trips were supported by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Cornell Southeast Asia Program, while my major fieldwork was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research grant and a Center for Khmer Studies Ph.D. Dissertation Research grant. Follow-up research was made possible by the Cornell Department of the History of Art, the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap, and the Cornell Graduate School. I would like to thank supporting institutions in Vietnam and Cambodia, in particular Sàn Art and the University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Ho Chi Minh City, and Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture and SA SA BASSAC in Phnom Penh. This work is indebted to the numerous artists and organizers who took the time to share stories, resources, and materials with me, too many that I am unfortunately unable to name here. In Ho Chi Minh City, I would like to thank Dinh Q. Lê, Zoe Butt, Richard Streitmatter-Tran, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Tiffany Chung, Hoàng Dương Cầm and Vũ Liên Phương, Bùi Công Khánh, Nguyễn Như Huy, Nguyễn Trung, Nguyễn Tấn Cường, Nguyễn Kim Tố Lan, and Quynh Pham. In Phnom Penh I would like to thank Erin Gleeson, Ly Daravuth, Tith Veasna, Linda Saphan, Sopheap Pich, Vandy Rattana, Vuth Lyno, Khvay Samnang, Kong Vollak, Heng Ravuth, Lim Sokchanlina, Dana Langlois, Lydia Parusol, Anida Yoeu Ali, and So Chenda. I would like to thank Lim Ratha for her assistance with Khmer-language translation and transcriptions. I have been fortunate to have had a community of colleagues in the areas of art history and Southeast Asian studies with whom to share my work in the United States, and at Cornell in particular. Many of my cohort have provided deep friendships and a sense of community in Ithaca that have made graduate school a wonderful experience. Ultimately, though, everything has been made possible through the support of my husband, Cuong Pham, and during the writing vi process, the moments of inspiration and joy provided by our son Holden, who showed me that breakthroughs can occur even during the most sleep-deprived moments. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch .................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................v List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... ix Introduction. Of Subjects and Space, of Representation and Experience .....................................1 Chapter 1. Drawn into the Global Art Map I: Ho Chi Minh City ................................................31 Post-Đổi Mới Abstraction and the Legacy of Saigonese Modernism ..............................35 Institutional Spaces and Blue Space Art Contemporary Art Center ..................................61 Diasporic Artists, Saigon Open City, and Alternative Art Spaces ....................................85 Chapter 2. Drawn into the Global Art Map II: Phnom Penh .....................................................118 Painters of Modern Life in Phnom Penh .........................................................................121 NGO Culture, Globalization, and the Shaping of Artistic Discourse in the Period of Cultural Rebuilding ....................................................................................................148 Chapter 3. “The ‘First’ Cambodian Contemporary Artist” ........................................................165 Leang Seckon ..................................................................................................................173 Sopheap Pich ...................................................................................................................187 Svay Ken .........................................................................................................................204 Vann Nath .......................................................................................................................215 Chapter 4. Symbolic Interventions in the Late Socialist Landscape of Ho Chi Minh City .......225 Chapter 5. Staging Affect and Excess .......................................................................................294 Chapter 6. Cambodian Artists Jump Scale ................................................................................347