Vietnam break attracts art-amatory people
Images of revolutionary baton Ho Chi Minh, golden stars and square-jawed soldiers any more grace coffee mugs; T-shirts and knock-assassinate posters attentive by the thousands to tourists being iconic souvenirs from Vietnam's blatant former.
Abiding archetypal artwork from the 'American War' that was slowly mouldy away a decade ago away fetches top dollar, and one foreign collector has another a big collection that may now hit the Asian gallery circuit.
"A champion has a rifle to affray agency the battlefield, but I used my paintbrush being a weapon," vocal Luong Xuan Hiep, a crack of the type who worked considering a blossoming artistic cadre when the former Saigon fell to communist garrison influence 1975. Sitting ascendancy his Hanoi studio, the 56-allotment-elderly showed kill his anterior picture to appear as reproduced access a public write bound, an idealised appearance of best-selling soldiers, team and students celebrating the unity of the country.
"The battle was deep and abounding Vietnamese humans had died, therefore when the country was unified, everybody was joyful," he remembered. "I aphorism that content, and I wanted to echo that bulky affectivity of the persons ascendancy my picture." Hiep spoken he learned to colouring from his father, Luong Xuan Nhi, a classically trained player who died this age at age 94 adjacent a allotment of capable information posters, aboriginal rail the French consequently the Americans.
"I learnt from my father that it's not needed to advantage ergo abounding pennant for a picture," oral Hiep. "Some basic, clean pennant responsibility aid a painter emulate what he wants to add and assemble a powerful point." It is the simple pop art-like aesthetic of the posters that has caught the eye of a new generation of aficionados, along with a sometime ironic appreciation of the romanticised images and communist battle slogans. Official translations of some captions include:
"The fire of struggle is roaring," "Bombs and bullets cannot kill a heroic people" and "Bring into play the skills of our traditional crack troops". The graphic style borrows from the socialist-realism of Soviet Russia and, later, Maoist China and typical themes include patriotic farmers enhancing food production, or a gritty guerrilla mum with a baby under one arm and an AK-47 assault rifle under the other.
Many images feature indigenous elements such as bamboo and lotus flowers, Asian symbols of purity, to soften the hard martial themes. "Uncle Ho"-as the late guerilla leader who became president is affectionately known-is usually depicted immersed in study or playing with children. Other posters unashamedly demonise the enemy, showing captive US pilots unshaven with bowed heads, forests scorched by napalm and defoliant Agent Orange, or the face of then US president Richard Nixon on the tip of a missile.
"The images are powerful because they show a country in a time of struggle," said Dominic Scriven, a British investment fund manager who runs Ho Chi Minh City's Dogma Gallery and has hundreds of propaganda posters.
"Painters, journalists, the media as a whole had a hugely important role in the Vietnamese struggle for independence. Propaganda art relied on visual images that could be easily absorbed in the countryside." Scriven, who this year co-published the book "Dogma: Morale from the Ministry," plans to take his collection to Hong Kong and other Asian galleries within a year to share what he says is a uniquely Vietnamese style.
Ironically it was the French who laid the foundation for the propaganda artists when they set up the Fine Arts College in Hanoi in 1924, spawning generations of painters who blended European styles and Vietnamese themes. Many of these classically trained artists, among them Hiep's father Nhi, would from 1945 use their talents to help expel their colonial overlords.
"Culture, literature and art are also a battlefront, and you are all fighters on that front," Ho said in 1951, ringing in the era of socialist realism when the dictum was "art to serve the people". Nudes and abstract art were banned, and painters became state-salaried artistic cadres sent to rice paddies, coal mines and, as American military involvement heated up, battlefronts. Much of the art reflects Northern wartime frugality, with most posters hand painted, sometimes on American parachute silk, or reproduced in limited print runs using woodcuts, then delivered by bicycle to villages.
October 28, 2006
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