Mai Chi (MC): I understand you came back this time to Hanoi after a long break. Your last stay in the city was 9 years ago? In your personal perception, how have the art scene of Hanoi and the people involved in it changed over these years?

Nora Taylor (NT): I was here briefly (for one month in 2000 and two weeks in 2003) since then. But you are right, I have not lived here since 1996. The most important change that I see in the art scene and the people involved in it is that it is no longer a coherent community. In my perception, during the early 1990s, artists were often grouped together, were friends, colleagues, attended exhibitions together, collaborated and voiced their opinions collectively. There was not just one group, but the groups were known and artists, art critics, and dealers were loyal to one another. One could distinguish several groups quite clearly. Often the groups fell into generational lines. The artists from the colonial period, the revolutionary artists and the Doi Moi artists, for example. You could tell which artist was part of which group based on how they painted. Colonial period artists painted portraits. Revolutionary artists painted war themes and Doi Moi artists painted abstract images or semi-abstract landscapes and still lives with lots of color. Today, it is much harder to distinguish groups. There might be some colonial period painters still alive but they generally do not make themselves very visible nor do they contribute to the art world, whereas before there was a sincere respect for them. Revolutionary painters might also still be around but their paintings styles are often inconsistent and generally lack coherence. Doi Moi painters have now split into so many groups that it is hard to keep track of what that definition means anymore. There are artists who work in new media, performance, video and installations. There are artists who still paint landscapes and still lifes in bold colors, there are neo-traditionalists painting calligraphy and Chinese like scroll paintings, there are painters who paint themselves over and over again, there are painters who paint nudes, women in Ao Dai and those who paint in lacquer. The variety is a good thing but what has been lost is that artists do not seem to talk to one another or to want to form a group, a movement along intellectual lines. There is not a running discussion among artists, nor a consensus on what art should be about. No debate. No “school” of art. In the early 1990s art critics also had a strong influence on the art world and the kind of art that is produced. I see very little art criticism being written. There is not a next generation Nguyen Quan. Although Tran Luong is a strong influence on the younger generation of installation, video and performance artists, he is not a critic and has not written a manifesto or a clear agenda for many of these young artists. In other words, there is no intellectual basis or foundation for many of the art works produced today, whereas before it seemed to me that artists in the early Doi Moi period received strong support from critics such as Thai Ba Van or Nguyen Quan who became the spokespeople for the new anti-socialist art.

MC: In what aspects is a discussion about “Why have there been no great Vietnamese artists” different than a discussion about, lets say, “Why have there been no great Vietnamese chess player”?

NT: The question might be similar but I expect the answers would be somewhat different. I originally asked this question as a way of critiquing the way in which “great” artists become famous in the West and as a way of explaining that Vietnamese artists cannot become famous or “great” because the system that produces great artists is prejudiced. If you ask the same question of a chess player you might expect the answer to be “because they are not good enough” and not because the chess world is biased against them. Can you say that of Vietnamese artists? Are Vietnamese artists not “great” because they are not good enough? Maybe. In fact, today, I would probably answer my own question differently. I might be more inclined to answer it like your question about chess players. For the past decade, Vietnamese artists have had a chance to compete in the international art circuit so why are there still no “great” Vietnamese artists? Whereas before I faulted the international art market, today, I might put the blame on the artists or at least on the Vietnamese art world and the internal system that controls who gets called “famous” or “great.” Why this change? Because, before artists were more isolated from the world of art outside of Vietnam and so they had an “excuse,” they were by definition provincial, minor artists, not “great” in the sense of receiving international fame, producing brilliant works appreciated by large numbers of people. Today, they cannot use their provincialism as an excuse and have the means, indeed, the money, even the freedom, to produce “great” works. But they might simply be lacking the talent, the ambition, or the imagination to be “great.”

MC: What would you say about the relationship center – periphery in the international art world nowadays? Has it changed for the better for artists from the periphery, including Vietnamese artists? Is the periphery now able to challenge the center or is it largely still the Western art institutions that define what “greatness” is? There seem to be quite a lot of controversial opinions on this issue.

NT: I agree that things have changed a lot since the 90s in that respect. I would say especially since Documenta 11 in 2002 curated for the first time by a non-Euro-American, a Nigerian art critic named Okwui Enwezor. That year, artists from the periphery, that is from Africa, Latin America, Australia and Asia formed the majority if not the totality of the show. And the Venice Bienniales over the past decade have also increasingly included artists from Asia. Thailand now has a pavilion, for example. Curators from Europe and America are paying attention to the art from Asia more and more closely. However, sometimes, I worry that it is nothing more than a passing fad. Indeed it might even be fashionable to have artists from Asia participate in these shows. But whether the art world has truly changed, that is another question. I worry, for example, that artists from Asia are still vastly underpaid for their work or that they are selected for inclusion in museum collections, international art exhibitions or galleries in New York and Paris, let us say, as a gimmick and not because they are considered “equal” in some ways to artists from the “center.” I think it is still Western art institutions such as the MoMa, the Centre Pompidou, the Venice Bienniale or the Whitney Bienniale that defines what is “great” art today.

What has also changed is that there are two artists who live and work in Vietnam today whose work is now recognized by these international institutions as being interesting to say the least, if not outright “great.” I am speaking of Dinh Q. Le and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. Neither grew up in Vietnam and Jun’s ethnic background is mixed. Jun was selected by the curatorial committee of the Venice Bienniale for the group exhibition as perhaps the first artist “from” Vietnam to have passed from the periphery to the center. Does this mean he can now be considered a “great” artist? Interestingly, even among Vietnamese artists, the criteria for being “great” is often if you have exhibited abroad. It is very common for artists to highlight their exhibitions in the US or Europe, regardless of the venue, on their CVs as if to prove their “greatness” in the eyes of a potential buyer or curator. In other words, while the art world has become “global”, artists from the periphery still use Western definitions of art as standards of “greatness.” I would not, however, say that international curators are applying the same criteria and standards. As Documenta and Venice have shown, curators believe greatness exists everywhere but artists from Vietnam are either highly insecure, or incredibly ignorant of the world outside of Vietnam, that they cannot measure or assess their own art in relation to other works outside of Vietnam.

MC: In her provoking article “Why have there been no great women artists” in 1971, Linda Nochlin argued that great artistic achievement is not something miraculous, mysteriously born by something called Genius, which must always manifest itself no matter the circumstances are, but human excellence is also a product of the social and institutional environments.

Are we demanding too much from the Vietnamese artists, whose profession in the country only started some 80 years ago, whereas 50 years of them were dominated by mind- and creativity killing Socialist Realism, and nowadays they are still working in a vacuum of infrastructure? Are we having a chicken and egg problem: a non-supportive social situation cannot cultivate talents, and the lack of great personalities, in turn, hinders the system to be transformed?

NT: Maybe. I certainly think there is truth to that and the system is as much to blame as the artists. Because I don’t live in a repressive system, I often underestimate the legitimate fears that people have of government or the control that the government has over information. But, one could also argue that Vietnam’s best artists are the ones who dared to defy the system or go outside of it. There have been many examples of places and times elsewhere in the world where adversity breeds creativity rather than hindering it, so you cannot solely blame the 50 years of war, socialist realism or poverty. I see two problems. One goes back further. And it has to do with China. I am often asked why painting in Vietnam only started in the 20^th century while Chinese artists have been producing “great” works for centuries. And why the Chinese Avant-garde, in spite of a violent cultural revolution, managed to parody Mao while artists in Vietnam can’t touch the figure of Ho Chi Minh? I think there is a lot of pressure on artists to compete with China and that measure is highly unfair for China is a gigantic country whereas Vietnam is still small, and one cannot expect Vietnamese artists to be on the same level as the Chinese. And yet, the comparison is often made because of the many centuries when Chinese culture had influence on Vietnamese politics, literature and religion. I think the ambiguity of the origins of Vietnamese national culture and the often contradictory influences from outside versus inside creates confusion and stifles creativity as much as anything actively controlled by the system.

The second problem is the paradox created by the utopian socialist system. On the one hand, the State liberated artists from the bourgeois market system by giving artists the means to create artwork that could express national sentiments rather than mere mimicry of French bourgeois tastes. On the other, the State confined art to the reductive process of illustrating vague notions of the nation, peasants and workers and did not teach art students to think for themselves or use their imagination. When Doi Moi appeared, artists were freer to choose their subjects but ironically, they had little guidance and a consumer market was created. Artists blindly followed their clients’ tastes and often these were the same utopian images of Vietnamese country life that both the State and the colonial clientele had dictated. In many ways, Vietnamese artists have not moved beyond colonialism.

This may not answer your question specifically but I do feel that there are multiple factors that contribute to artists’ lack of creativity. It is not quite so simple as naming one obstacle that could be overcome and “Bingo! Artists are free.” That was the Doi Moi promise. I believe there are unconscious factors too. And recently I have been interested in psychological issues and trauma and I wonder if artists aren’t trapped in post-traumatic shock and the whole nation needs to undergo some sort of therapy to rid itself of its fears. Vietnamese artists aren’t known for their boldness and even if there were a great intellectual out there, he or she may be afraid of expressing his or herself. I think artists are practicing auto-censorship as much as the system does.

A third issue is the one of overseas Vietnamese artists. As I mentioned earlier, artists like Dinh Q. Le and Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba who have lived overseas and therefore do not share this legacy of war, trauma, guilt, censorship, socialist utopia, that their peers have lived with, are returning to Vietnam and perhaps bringing with them a new way of creating “Vietnamese” art that might inspire a younger generation to think “outside of the box” as the American expression goes.

MC: Thank you for the interview, Nora.

Nora Taylor is a researcher of Vietnamese art history and professor at Arizona University. She is currently completing her sabbatical year in Hanoi on a Fulbright grant. Her publications include Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (University of Hawaii Press, 2004;) Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley O’Connor (Editor) SEAP-Cornell University Press, 2000 and Le Vietnam au Feminin (Co-Editor) Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005, as well as numerous articles in selective journals.

© 2005 talawas