Nora Taylor Painters in Hanoi an Ethnography of Vietnamese Art University of Hawaii Press 2009

This commodity is published every bit part of the inaugural AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency 2021/2022.

Final year, I embarked on a two-month research that sought to sketch a possible genealogy of "Vietnamese contemporary art" that foregrounds female art practitioners. Spanning two print issues of a mag, roughly 20-one pages, the final essay celebrates more than than twenty figures of diverse practices, who were, and are, prominent to the local art scene. ¹ ² In retrospect, it was likewise ambitious to effort to practice justice to the topic, but during that process, I stumbled upon a seminal show: Changing Identity: Recent Works past Women Artists from Vietnam , a multi-media exhibition curated by Nora Annesley Taylor.³ Traveling across the Us in the mid-2000s, it brought together 10 female artists of Vietnamese heritage whose practices ranged from painting and photography to performance, installation, and mixed media. ⁴ At that place were no explicit unifying themes, although in a brief discussion of the works, Taylor implied that gender, heritage, and war were among the artists' shared "concerns."⁵ ^six She argued that the approach was not to reduce these creative expressions to a atypical style or genre, just to manifest a heterogeneity lying at the intersection of art, women, and Vietnam—three intertwined domains to which these artists were subjected. While the testify might accept led to representative interpretations of fine art by women from Việt Nam and the diasporas, it left an indelible legacy regardless.

On the forepart comprehend of the exhibition catalogue was a photograph that moved me equally it still does, which spoke to the proactive forces that Changing Identity and the artists' practices possessed. It was here that I encountered the oeuvre of an artist underrepresented in the local discourse of contemporary photography: Phuong Thou. Practice, or Đỗ Mỹ Phượng⁷ .

Phuong M. Do, "hanoi, vietnam, 1998 (self in street)," 1998, Gelatin silver impress. 19" x 15". Courtesy of the artist.

Born in Laos, Phuong M. Exercise is a US-based leadership autobus who has had a reparative relationship with photography for more xx years.⁸ Her humble body of work revolves around the self, place, memory, and most recently, archival documentation. Raised in the Laotian upper-case letter, she later immigrated to America with her firsthand family, while some of her relatives stayed in Việt Nam, and some moved to France. In 1988, she earned a Available's degree in Colorado. In 1991, she landed a professional chore in the not-profit sector in Washington, DC, helping war-impacted Vietnamese, Laotian, Hmong, and Cambodian communities with leadership evolution. She before long constitute herself in New York Country with another chore and eventually finished a Chief's programme in Social Work. In 1998, after four years of working there, she felt that she needed a alter. "I merely felt like I wasn't fulfilling," says Do. And and then she turned to photography.

Family effectually the tabular array, union in way

To navigate guild is to meander in betwixt loci of social relations. The family, among other societal constituents, is such a site, where these relations are constantly laid bare, constructed and deconstructed. Familial member(-relation-)ship not only imitates external power relations only also presents itself equally a framework for society at large. Thus, to place oneself in the family is to situate oneself in the world, and vice versa.

Transcending and conjoining identity, kinship, collective retentivity, and representation, the photographic series self + family is Do'southward effort to make tangible her relationship with her intercontinentally dispersed extended family and her connection to Việt Nam. An array of black and white and colour counterpart portraits, self + family unit goes beyond simple addition formulae, not equally straightforward as 1 + 1 = 2. It is a site of struggle, betwixt inclusion and exclusion, reconciliation and disconnection.

Do started the projection in 1998, boarding a airplane to Hà Nội for the first time. The experience was not without difficulties. In a Zoom call with me, she says that she felt "numb" sometimes while hesitating to contact her paternal relatives. Everything was a first to her. One day, she realised that the only manner to "feel something was to be in the center of [the] street." For her, equally for many in Việt Nam, crossing the traffic was stressful. "It's similar waiting, waiting. And so you simply go in. And once you become in, it's okay." The artist gave two local kids some money to stand baby-sit on both sides of the tripod, so that it would non be knocked over by passing vehicles. Standing on the line separating traffic lanes, she posed unwavering and resolute, holding the shutter release in one manus, despite all the bikes lurking backside. The black outfit set her in farther dissimilarity with the surroundings. In less than v minutes, Do initiated her first engagement with the country and its people through cocky in street (1998).

As she somewhen joined her kin in the subsequently images, she attempted to grasp what it meant to be in a nuclear family of Vietnamese beginnings. How is the family synthetic through individuals and their relations? Where does the family locate? And how extended can kinship be?

Eating and clothing are two preeminent modes of collectivity, and consequently, belonging, in the Vietnamese family, as evident in this series. On the one manus, eating, every bit well as drinking, co-exists with gathering (greetings, celebrations, remembrance), talking (stories, gossiping, memories), watching Boob tube (commenting, relaxing, debating). These activities often take identify indoors, mostly at domicile—where people unite and (re)connect—so family is ofttimes equated with "home." It is interesting to encounter hither how abode or precisely the concept of "family around the table" is trans-border, carried from one state to the next without losing its essence or identification.

On the other hand, vesture is a tool to blend in. Although it can play a divisive role in society, as proven past advent-based racial/sexist/gender discrimination, what one wears has the potential to mitigate alienation also. Whether intentional or not, Do's choice of clothing mirrored and adapted to different contexts, as a means of self-initiated integration. Inclusion tin lead to interpersonal reconciliation, although to which caste remains open for fence.

Phuong M. Practice, "la chu, vietnam, 2001 (self with relatives)," 2001, Chromogenic print. 10" x 8". Courtesy of the artist.

Problematising the political construction of family unit

Beyond the personal, the family unit is a socio-political structure. It is situated at the intersection of politics and history. With inclusion comes exclusion, and belonging, displacement. For instance, in that location is no guarantee that in the aforementioned interactions with family, a "crack" would never happen. Ane moment peaceful talk proceeds, and in the next, a dispute may erupt. On a macro level, the family bears witness to political turmoil and historical disruptions and is subject to a perpetual cycle of political intervention. What does it mean, then, to be a office of the family that is socially, culturally, and politically "dismembered" or e'er probable and then?

23 years after that first visit dorsum to Việt Nam , Do observes : "This whole disconnect of place, dwelling house, family, is similar you drop a mirror and you're trying to put it back together, so the reflection is sort of fragmented."

Exile and immigration in the aftermath of political displacement straight contributes to this fragmentation. The process was never without pain, trauma, and loss. Reeducation, refugee, and military camps abounded. "Gunkhole people." Away from their motherland, immigrants became polarised, politicised entities and bore hyphenated identities: "Asian American," "Vietnamese American," " Việt Kiều ." ^nine Every bit a teenager in America, Do endured discrimination at schoolhouse; at home, traditional values confronted her. "Then you're no proficient inside, and you're no good outside," she describes.

The cultural gap between the artist and her kin left her feeling alienated, "ever the outsider." "There'southward a sense of connection because of family unit. But culturally, yous're always not quite well," she notes. At times, while doing the projection in Việt Nam, Do tried to engage in deep conversations and form a truly "relationship" with her relatives, but constitute it one-sided. As she recalled, they were initially curious about her camera and equipment, only did not seem interested in prolonged interaction. "They just ignore me […] They don't fifty-fifty ask 'so what practice these pictures hateful to you lot, mean to us?'" Meanwhile, relatives in France to whom she thought she was close did non connect with her, either. At this point, Do realised that it was beyond cultural boundaries. The issue lay deep inside the personal layer of herself—a sense of being uprooted.

"Taken away from where yous are, and you lot'd never find that balance again," she says.

Despite the all-time efforts, memory, identity, or family, once cleaved, displaced, or detached, remains scarred as such. Fixing might crusade further breaking. There is the run a risk of getting hurt from the broken shatters one tries to touch or assemble. There is also dubiety, numbness, and void. As time unfolds, history or the past is never the same as it used to be, equally much as it will never be like it is. "Fragmented." The (re)writing, transmitting, (united nations)learning of history is subjective, rendering "the past" not or never true.

Only what is "truthful," anyways? "Which truth?" and "why truth at all?", as Trịnh T. Minh-Hà asks in Woman, Native, Other . ¹⁰ Trịnh pushes against the "need for clarification" and entangles the human relationship between truth and fact, story and history. "On the one mitt, each society has its own politics of truth; on the other mitt, being truthful is beingness in the in-between of all regimes of truth." ^eleven

However, this does not deny the happenings of history. It is factual and truthful to say that the Vietnam War, as the English-speaking world knows it, or Kháng chiến chống Mỹ (cướu nước) / Đế quốc Mỹ xâm lược / Chiến tranh Đông Dương lần 2 , a few often recited Vietnamese terms, resulted in high casualties and spanned beyond ii decades. ¹² When the North and the South were reunited nether one regime in 1975, the tragedy never only ended. Its legacy, one prominent of which is political displacement, has left a permanent imprint on generations of pre-, intra-, and post-war periods.

Thus, the formula in self + family is more subtractive than additive. As the championship hints at the same outcome of cultural disconnection, the need to insert ("+") her presence likewise means that she was, and still is, according to her, not a part of the family unit , which is at present beyond kinship; she is other in her culture.

Representation revisited through agency and intimacy

Representation is often distorted, simply like the histories that support or deny it. Seeing no humanity in the internet images that easily redirect a search for the nation to a search for the state of war, Exercise insisted on constructing her own narrative of Việt Nam through self + family, and afterward through Establish Photographs, Vietnam . Discussing the inclusion of herself in the former project, she recollects:

"What became clear to me was that I want to be seen as someone who was making the photograph. […] I want the observer to know that I'grand observing them looking at me in the photograph."

She is not only in that location; she looks directly into the camera. Challenging the politics of looking, the gaze is such a provocative tool. It demands attention not but to the subject (the observer) only too to the effect information technology entails (the observed). Photography initially aided colonialism by documenting the "exoticism" of indigenous communities for exhibition, entertainment, and exploitation. Artists such every bit Exercise ultimately disrupts that concatenation of cultural production. This kind of subversive viewership transmits disciplinarian status from ane terminate to some other. By interrupting the catamenia of daily life with her presence, she captures a slice of time that was previously erased among the abundance of violence-infused images of the war.

With such agency, the creative person also took literal hold of the narrative by property on to the shutter release. The cable extends from the border of an prototype to her manus, as Taylor imagined, like "an umbilical string between the photographic camera and herself." ^thirteen Beyond this feminist illustration, I argue that not simply does it transport the imaginary viewer across temporal and spatial dimensions, just such an act also contributes to the problematisation of family unit and society as intertwined entities.

This sentiment of representation is echoed in Found photographs, Vietnam . Including approximately a one thousand blackness-and-white analogue prints, it is a digitised annal of snapshots, family unit portraits, studio and hymeneals shoots dated roughly betwixt the 1940s and 1970s, abased by those who left the country in the aftermath of the Autumn of Sài Gòn. ¹⁴ This lively evidence of quotidian life, unbothered past bombastic propaganda, revealed to her a side of Việt Nam she could non take witnessed elsewhere. This was the Việt Nam of that flow, or the representation of it, that the global media used to and still more often than not miss. ¹⁵

"It was the intimacy in these photographs that was left backside and displaced past state of war that I recognised and was moved by." ^xvi

Although she did not have any criteria in mind while thrifting for these, the images are joyful and candid. We often hear trauma relived in the stories told by survivors of the war; nothing of the sort is explicitly present in these photographs. This is not to condone the significance of survivors' stories only to highlight joyful intimacy equally a necessary, culling, reparative approach to remembrance.

Phuong M. Do, "cảnh sau nhà anh long (view from cousin long'due south apartment)," 2005. fourteen″ 10 19″. Courtesy of the artist.

Photography and its materiality and legacy

Supported by the 2004-2005 Fulbright grant, lacquered photographs is a series of street photography taken in various cities such as Thái Nguyên, Hà Nội, and Hồ Chí Minh metropolis, from 2000 to 2008. Captured are night and twilight sceneries of both tranquility and dynamic corners of the urban life: apartment units with occupied rooms lit from inside, a street vendor waiting for customers, a street of crowds flowing in different directions, etc.

Information technology is in the still of the night, in contrast to the noise of the day, that Do found connection with Việt Nam. She was drawn to how vividly life emerged nether the lights when the public and the individual intertwine. She played a guessing game in her mind, wondering what people were thinking about every bit she wandered nigh the nightfall.

In this serial, photography is complemented past lacquer. With the photographic print mounted onto a console, then coated with ten layers of lacquer, the final production gleams with the protective shine. ¹⁷

Practise establish material and artistic parallels between the two. With its resin, lacquer provides long-lasting preservation as much as photography preserves the retentivity of the captured moment. Dealing with lacquer paint proves harmful to the health of the artists; and then is developing counterpart photography with chemicals. Moreover, the quondam produces highly priced appurtenances merely also coats mundane objects of daily employ such as utensils, while photography is sometimes highly regarded, in the case of fine fine art, but also easily dispensable, equally in vernacular photography.

Exemplified by Institute Photographs, Vietnam , the latter category of photography is more prone to dispossession. Admitting personally intimate, these images had long cried for exposure, she recalls. For a long time, the artist had called them "abandoned photographs"—in many senses, because they were physically and figuratively disowned and displaced from one hand to another. So something switched. She started seeing the collection which had been sitting around for ages differently—as found photographs. Found by her, and to be found by the world. She says: "I'1000 beingness a channel, and these things are talking to me in some ways."

As a whole, this long-term project is a bridge that connects the past with the nowadays and future: people in distant times get subjected to contemporary viewership, while present generations and those to come get to relive histories and unearth stories. This is the preservative impulse of photography that transcends the temporality of its creators and cloth.

Nature every bit Guidance of Peace

In 2017, when Trump was elected as the 45 th President of the United States, Do started a diary-similar project, 1460 days . As the title suggests, this series spans beyond four years, compiling snapshots of everyday life, from wild fauna, mountains, oceans, deserts, to crowded streets, festivals, buildings, tourist attractions, and family unit. There was seemingly nada experimental or conceptual to this project, but a pure practice of composition and framing going back to the basics of photography. Each day, a single or a hoard of photos, sometimes videos, got uploaded to an Instagram business relationship dedicated to the projection.

What mattered was the consistency involved, a routine for her to find peace of heed among the political shift in America. "It was a traumatic moment," she recalls. Documenting whatsoever intrigued her started out as a short-term action to cope with her disappointment, eventually expanding into a daily habit every bit it became "nourishing."

"It actually was about being in the moment, and seeing things and living basically, solar day to day, and being there."

Photography is not only the bridge Do attempts to cross in order to patch what has been torn—identity, family, civilisation—but besides her meditation, like a "Buddhist practice." This extends to her current philosophy about the medium in general: when doing photography, 1 has to be present because 1 just takes photographs of subjects to which one feels continued.

1460 days helped the creative person reform her bond with nature, its underlying theme. Nearly of the photos are snippets of natural life performing their daily rituals in the wild, making small yet collectively grand impacts on humanity, which announced minuscule in comparison.

And so are the storms one cannot contain. At that place are events in life that, for Practice, are out of accomplish and beyond command. If all has been done, let it be.

Life/Photography every bit a Puzzling Struggle

"Most of my life is trying to put the pieces back together. The many different pieces. What I wanted to do with photography was to deal with that."

The themes of displacement, intergenerational and intercultural problems, and connectedness recurred throughout our hours-long Zoom conversation. Today, the political and sociocultural issues elbowing for attention in the headlines—environmental crunch, political disorder, civil strife, global health disaster, to name but a few—are different from when Do started out. Global club seems every bit fragmented equally ever since the pandemic.

And yet, torn apart as we are, we all have to brand choices in our lives. And to find what fits and what does non is a lifelong learning process that requires one to constantly change, reflect, and grow.

Do refers to identity equally a "jacket." To exist something, someone, from somewhere, is to put on a garment, whether by option or by external influence.

"I only don't experience like I tin say I'm Vietnamese, or I'm Vietnamese American. […] I'm a denizen of the United States so just call me American. But you expect at my face, and you've decided that I'm not American. [As] long as gild wants to put y'all in certain boxes, that question is always upwards to someone else."

Choosing your characterization(s) can be a process of growth. With the evolution of identity politics in the past decades, in many parts of the earth people have agency to navigate who they are and how they want to be seen past the world. For Do, information technology is about letting get of confrontation and focusing on herself.

"I don't care as much—whether I'm Vietnamese or not. I used to care that I need to know. I demand to know if I have this connectedness to Việt Nam and that I am part of this thing. This identity. But now, it's non and so important. Considering I think if information technology's still so of import, then I don't think I have grown in terms of understanding who I am."

Do uses photography as a thread to tie knots, a pair of scissors to cut ties, and a compass to seek peace of mind. With each project comes a new puzzle to solve. And Do moves around the board, to see what fits and what does not.

Phuong M. Do, "Untitled, establish photograph." Part of ongoing project "Institute Photographs, Vietnam: Looking Dorsum, Remembering Forward." Courtesy of the artist.

Bibliography (For further reading)

Cheng, Anne Anlin. " Yellow Skin, White Gold ." IDEAS, Asia Art Archive, Jan ix, 2020.

Đồng, Nhuận H. "Chân Dung của Hơn 20 Gương Mặt Nữ Tiêu Biểu" [2020 Tribute: An Extensive List of 20+ Female Figures in Vietnamese Contemporary Fine art] (bilingual). Published in two parts. Fine art Republik Vietnam i (2020): 203-213; Art Republik Vietnam 2 (2021): 192-201.

Kim, Elaine H., Margo Machida, and Sharon Mizota, eds.. Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Fine art . Berkeley: Academy of California Press, 2020.

Kwon, Miwon. "Wink in the East, Flash in the W." In The Migrant's Time: Rethinking Art History and Diaspora , edited by Saloni Mathur, 196-205. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2011.

Lee, Weng Choy. " Criticism and 'the Essence of Contemporary Asian Art' ." IDEAS, Asia Art Annal, May 1, 2004.

Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy, Lan P. Duong, Mariam B. Lam, Kathy L. Nguyễn, eds. Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora . Washington: University of Washington Printing, 2020.

Taylor, Nora Annesley. Irresolute Identity: Recent Works past Women Artists from Vietnam .

Washington, DC: International Arts & Artists, 2007. Published in conjunction with a traveling exhibition of the same title.

Taylor, Nora Annesley. Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art . Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009.

Taylor, Nora Annesley and Pamela Nguyen Corey. "Đổi Mới and the Globalization of Vietnamese Art." Journal of Vietnamese Studies fourteen, no. 1 (2019): 1-34.

Trịnh, T. Minh-Hà. Women, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism . Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Wong, Mimi. " The Aesthetic Project of Remaking 'Yellow' Identity ." IDEAS, Asia Art Archive, April 20, 2020.

Zhuang, Wubin. Photography in Southeast Asia: A Survey . Singapore: NUS Printing, 2016.

Notes

I would like to give thanks Phuong M. Do and Nora Taylor for their time, patience with, and wisdom in our long Zoom conversations. I would besides like to express my hostage gratitude towards Nabilah Said for all the mentorship, patience, and help, besides every bit the ArtsEquator squad and Goethe-Institut Singapore for facilitating this virtual residency. Writing this piece would be impossible if it had not been for these humans and this initiative.

This commodity continues my ongoing enquiry on self-identified female art professionals in/from Việt Nam and the diasporas. Equally i affair I have come to realise during this residency, writing as well as research is a process of constant revisions. Thank you for reading. Please write to me at donghanhuan@gmail.com if there are whatever inquiries and feedback regarding this article, or to connect.

This article is published every bit part of the inaugural AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency 2021/2022. Read more about the programme and the six resident writers here.

Almost the author(s)

Ha Nhuan Dong

Đồng Hà Nhuận (he/him) is a cultural writer and disquisitional learner whose main concerns seep through critical theories, contemporary arts, cultural phenomena, environmental issues, and ethnic tensions. Born, raised, and formerly based in Hồ Chí Minh city, Việt Nam, he is currently residing on unceded Indigenous country that is Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), Canada, to pursue his pedagogy. His enquiry tracks the spontaneous developments of contemporary art in Việt Nam and its diasporas as well as the bookish soapbox on the subject. His writing has appeared on Fine art Republik Vietnam, Saigoneer, Matca, Hanoi Grapevine, and elsewhere.

pughmigge1948.blogspot.com

Source: https://artsequator.com/phuong-m-do/

Nora Taylor Painters in Hanoi an Ethnography of Vietnamese Art University of Hawaii Press 2009

This commodity is published every bit part of the inaugural AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency 2021/2022.

Family effectually the tabular array, union in way

Problematising the political construction of family unit

Representation revisited through agency and intimacy

Photography and its materiality and legacy

Nature every bit Guidance of Peace

Life/Photography every bit a Puzzling Struggle

Almost the author(s)

Ha Nhuan Dong

0 Response to "Nora Taylor Painters in Hanoi an Ethnography of Vietnamese Art University of Hawaii Press 2009"

Post a Comment

Iklan Atas Artikel

Iklan Tengah Artikel 1

Iklan Tengah Artikel 2

Iklan Bawah Artikel