Art: Vietnam now

A new show at the Weisman Art Museum surveys recent art by 10 Vietnamese women.

By Mary Abbe, Star Tribune

February 1, 2009 at 6:01AM
A portrait by Nguyen Thi Chau Giang
A portrait by Nguyen Thi Chau Giang (Troy Melhus/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

For many Americans, thoughts of Vietnam arrive as troubled memories: throbbing helicopters, clouds of napalm, body bags, war protests at home and abroad. But, of course, Vietnam has moved on to develop a vibrant economy, a thriving tourist industry and even an art scene.

A snapshot of the latter is on view at the University of Minnesota's Weisman Art Museum, which today opens "Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists From Vietnam." With just 10 artists selected by American art historian Nora Taylor, the show samples contemporary and traditional media -- ink drawings, photography, expressionist painting, installation, watercolor, portraiture, performance documentation. Some of the artists were educated in Vietnam and others in the United States, including at such prestigious venues as Yale and New York University.

Given the diversity of style, subject and media on view, the show inevitably has an uneven, patchwork quality. Nevertheless, as the first U.S. exhibit of contemporary female Vietnamese artists, "Identity" merits attention.

Given such a highly specialized subject, myriad questions spring to mind: What sort of training, if any, shapes the art of contemporary Vietnam? Is there a dominant style or medium? What is its origin? Is there a market for art by Vietnamese women?

Taylor, who in 2004-05 was a Fulbright Scholar in Hanoi, provides a handy overview in the slender exhibition catalog ($20, International Arts & Artists). Western-style painting was introduced to Vietnam by the French, who established a Beaux Arts-style academy in Hanoi in 1925. After French rule ended, the academy evolved into what is now the Hanoi University of Fine Arts, the school of choice for contemporary talent. In the south, several craft schools consolidated into the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts.

Until the 1990s, both schools emphasized traditional art "that hovered between Chinese-style socialist realism and a European-derived post-impressionist style," Taylor writes. While women now make up nearly half of the membership of the state-sponsored Artists' Association, men continue to dominate the art market that caters to tourists and international aesthetes, she reports. That's the background against which Taylor mounted the "Identity" show, which has toured the United States for two years.

Tradition vs. modernity

Tradition animates the elegant ink drawings of Nguyen Bach Dan, whose landscapes hover between realistic impressions of a snow-covered woods and a virtually abstract blizzard of dots and dashes describing a sun-dappled forest. The watercolors of Dinh Thi Tham Poong seem to owe their elegant simplicity to Communist-era propaganda posters and the colorful charm of the ethnic costumes she depicts. Fine lines and beautiful planes of translucent color give fairy-tale delicacy to the fish, fans and spirit-figures that Vu Thu Hien depicts on mulberry paper.

Photography allows An-My Le and Phuong M. Do to express their ambivalence about their Vietnamese heritage. Both felt displaced when they returned to Vietnam as adults. Lee's silvery images capture seemingly timeless landscapes of rivers, farms and garden plots, while Do depicts herself staring impassively at the camera, apparently left out of the convivial family meals and festivities around her.

Among the paintings, the ethnographic and highly personal imagery of Nguyen Thi Chau Giang is especially noteworthy. With their barbs, wounds and vegetal imagery, her luminous self-portraits echo the tortured images of Frida Kahlo, while her studies of elderly villagers exude compelling pathos.

The show's oldest artist, Dang Thi Khue, born in 1946, nods to traditional crafts and costumes with installations that incorporate textiles, scarves, wooden sandals, masks and carvings.

The show rounds out in self-indulgent Western style with sometimes whimsical stick-figure paintings by Dinh Y Nhi, moody blue portraits by Ly Tran Quynh Giang and a fashionably inexplicable video and installation (of sanitary napkins and dirty diaper) by Ly Hoang Ly. Assuming that "Identity" offers a reasonable cross-section of contemporary Vietnamese women's art, it suggests that they struggle with the same vexing existential and aesthetic issues that confound artists everywhere.

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431

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Mary Abbe, Star Tribune