The Hong Kong Standard, 1998
By Richard Frost
The French did little for the Vietnamese people during their 56-year colonial rule, because they never felt there was any gain in the development or education of the country. The major effect of their rule was to harden Vietnamese resolve for independence, the strength of which was displayed against French and American troops during the two wars in Indochina.
But this dark colonial legacy contained a spark of light. In the 1920s an art college, the Ecole des Beaux Arts de l’Indochine, was opened in Hanoi. Its first principal was Victor Tardieu who had been a colleague of Matisse in Paris. Its students were introduced to oil painting and trained in the Western art tradition, the scientific laws of perspective and the classical proportions of the human body.
Previously Vietnamese art work had performed more of a functional role, said Shirley Hui, a Chinese American art dealer who deals only in works from Vietnam. Mrs Hui said other mediums such as ceramics and poetry were stronger. Paintings were generally used to decorate New Year festivals or adorn temples. The Vietnamese had never really learnt the elitist painting techniques of their ancient rulers, Mrs Hui said, because the Chinese were very secretive.
With the introduction of the centuries-oil tradition of Western painting, Vietnamese artists made it their own. They worked within the Western medium but from a Vietnamese perspective, seeing it as the expression of a more open society.
Two more major art colleges were established in the 1950s: the Hanoi College of Fine Arts and the Gia Dinh National College of Fine Arts in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. Painting became a valuable and often vital means of imaginative expression of, and escape from, the sadness of the decades of war that had followed independence in 1945.
The darkness of that era is reflected in the works of Do Quang Em, a painter born in 1942 who graduated from the Gia Dinh National College of Fine Arts at 23. Both his grandfather and father had been prize-winning photographers, a medium that was Mr Em’s first love. He turned to painting, however, using the brush and the paint to create poignant shadow-filled canvasses brightened by areas of light and rich colour. The clarity and details of his paintings, which are portraits and still-lifes, are remarkable; it is easy to mistake his work for photographs. “The dark spaces in his work mean a lot to him,” Mrs Hui said. “He was put in prison and didn’t see his son for a long time.”
Another artist, Nguyen Thanh Binh, paints in minimalist style with simple white, browns and the odd touch of black and red. He is another artist who is influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures. Much of the canvas is left to empty space, something Mr Binh derives from Japanese poetry. Answering why he uses so little colour, he has said: “It is like the haiku poetry of Japan. A haiku is a very small poem containing only three lines but its meaning is enormous. Art can have enormous meaning with very few colours and details.” With their diverse styes, Vietnamese painters create works of art that are symbolic of their country but accessible to people from others.
