WHY HAVE THERE BEEN NO GREAT VIETNAMESE ARTISTS?

Hanoi School of Fine Arts, founded in 1925, where most artists in Vietnam have trained.

The title of this essay is a reference to Linda Nochlin's seminal 1971 article "Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists."[1] Nochlin argues not that women are incapable of being great artists but rather that men essentially control the processes by which artists become famous. Similarly, artists from peripheral loci of art production—that is, outside the Western art market centers in places such as Vietnam—often "exist" or are known only because Western galleries, art auction houses, or even art historians have situated them. The process of identifying and locating art from a place like Vietnam that rarely figures in art history tells us something about how art history is written. In asking the question of why there haven't been great Vietnamese artists, I am essentially asking how art history accounts for Vietnamese art. Is there room for great Vietnamese artists in our art histories? How can we write an art history of Vietnam that does not place Vietnamese artists on the fringe of some greater notion of art history but rather gives it a place that represents it fairly? I am personally interested in this issue because I am an art historian of Vietnam, and I have had to question why Vietnamese art is still seen as peripheral to mainstream art history and why Vietnamese artists are so rarely studied in surveys of Asian art. But I am also interested in examining the ways in which some Vietnamese artists and their public have constructed particular identities that conform to notions of Asian art that can be seen as condescending while others have challenged these notions. In other words, I am asking what it means to be a Vietnamese artist in a changing and increasingly global world. My comments are personal observations and opinions based on a decade of researching Vietnamese art and do not necessarily reflect the views of all Vietnamese artists.

This idea of challenging center-periphery oppositions in art continues a discussion among Asian scholars and scholars of Asia, most notably Alice Yang and John Clark, who have argued for a change in the way that Asian art history is written, to bring it closer to Asian realities.[2] Scholars of Vietnam have also engaged in these views. Keith Taylor, for example, has proposed looking at Vietnamese history from a regional perspective rather than a Western one. In Western studies of Asian arts, artists are conventionally seen as anonymous entities. Despite the existence of extensive biographies of Chinese artists, artists in peripheral spheres such as Southeast Asia or the Pacific Islands have often been seen as collective artists, their identities blurred into one ethnic or national framework. Although that is adequate for the past, when artists rarely left traces of their names, making their contributions to artistic production difficult to document, that will not do for the present. Unfortunately, the perception that artists in Southeast Asia do not care about originality or operate in groups is perpetuated in the contemporary art world, where artists considered to be Indonesian or Vietnamese are exhibited based on their ethno-nationality rather than individual achievements. Similarly, Asian qualities are often imposed on artists in the West who have some Asian background. For example, at a recent Venice Bienniale, France's pavilion included French artists of Chinese descent who were showcased as emblems of France's new multicultural make-up. The emphasis on their Chinese ethnicity in publicity material placed a burden on the artists, who were then expected not to be French but rather to confirm that they were still in essence Chinese. In my book, I look at ways in which Vietnamese artists have been viewed by their Western teachers, viewers, and consumers. I balance this one-sidedness by focusing on artists and their community relations in Hanoi. This enables me to individualize artists' experiences and contextualize their work.[3]

I was initially drawn to Vietnam as a graduate student in Southeast Asian art history precisely because few people in America knew anything about the art of this region. Having grown up in Europe and having just spent several years working in Paris, I set out to find how the French wrote the art history of their former colony. This led me to explore colonial discourses toward art, but it still did not tell me much about the art itself. It wasn't until I was able to travel to Vietnam for my field research that I was confronted with the reality of Vietnamese art history. Although alive and well in artists' studios, there was little Vietnamese art to be found in museums and archives. A luxury item in the view of a government with little cash available for preservation, conservation, and documentation, art and its history existed through people. I had little choice but to resort to what I call an ethnographic approach to my subject. I talked to people, went to art openings, interviewed artists, spoke with art historians, curators, critics, and administrators. The result was an art history, a chronological sequence of events that affected art styles and themes over the better part of the twentieth century. I wrote what I perceived as a type of art history that resembled other art histories I had read and studied.[4]

My research focused on Hanoi primarily because at the time when I began my fieldwork, there were some restrictions on research venues. Visiting researchers could not, for example, travel the country freely without obtaining the necessary permissions. My research visa had been facilitated through the Center for Cooperative Research in Vietnamese Studies, headed by Dr. Phan Huy Le and based in Hanoi. It seemed easier to stay in Hanoi than to try to travel up and down the country several times. I also began to realize how Hanoi-centered Vietnamese art history was—meaning that most historians I met considered the cultural center of Vietnam to be Hanoi. The geographic split between north and south was mirrored in the art world and, to be fair to the artists in the south whose lives and works were equally tied to notions of "Vietnameseness," I chose to focus my research on Hanoi and not perpetuate the idea that Vietnamese art meant Hanoi art. In this essay, however, I deliberately choose to speak about Vietnamese art as a whole to question this assumption that all art made in Vietnam is one and the same thing.

Since completing my dissertation, I began to reflect more on the process of obtaining art historical information from Vietnam. What is it about Vietnamese art that made it necessary for me to compile data based on live interviews rather than reading books? As I worked on charting dimensions of twentieth-century art, the lives of artists around me were changing rapidly, as were the ways in which the outside world became familiar with Vietnamese painting. A thriving art market facilitated by tourism has brought Vietnamese paintings into French, Australian, American, and Singaporean homes. Christie's and Sotheby's have begun to auction what they call masters of Vietnamese modern art, and artists are touring the world taking part in international exhibitions, bienniales, and triennials. These, I will argue, are part of the new discourses on Vietnamese art that inform art historical writing. They present Vietnamese art and artists in a way that affects perceptions by the general public and ultimately students of Southeast Asian art history.

In this essay, I would like to address some of the discourses that have informed twentieth-century Vietnam's art and art history. First, I will discuss how art historical discourses in Vietnam relate to colonial discourses about the nature of modernity versus tradition, the West versus the East. Secondly, I will talk about identity, gender, and the roles that artists play in their community. Lastly, I will explain how globalization has influenced discourses about art in the last decade. Two of these issues concern Vietnamese relations with the outside world. This factor has contributed significantly to the perception that Vietnamese art exists primarily as seen from Western art historical perspectives. The issue of identity is more closely related to how artists in Vietnam view themselves and their relation to their own historical perception of art, as one of kinship and genealogy. Let me first discuss how colonialism has affected discourses about art both during the colonial period and the present.

In 1925 the French artist Victor Tardieu opened his Ecole des Beaux-Arts d'Indochine, Hanoi's first art academy. There, he proposed, aspiring natives could be transformed from "artisans" to "artists." This situation follows the common colonial paradigm in which the outsider becomes the modernizer or educator of the ignorant native. Tardieu, who was revered by his students, believed in the colonial mission civilisatrice or "civilizing mission," that it was the duty of the French administration to "civilize" the indigenous population through education, professional training, and other cultural projects.[5] The native population was thus not only deemed inferior to the foreigner but began to feel inferior as well. Frantz Fanon has described the intellectual legacy of colonialism and the prevailing social atmosphere during the colonial period in Africa as one of rampant insecurity. The desire to become educated was not mere ambition; it was also a drive to overcome feelings of inferiority and failure.[6] Indochinese artists themselves began their studies with a sense that French painting was superior to Indochinese painting and were eager to learn these Western ways.

By imitating their "masters'" works, the native students, however, only reinforced a sense of the foreigners' superiority. Vietnamese had to walk the fine line between achieving so-called civilization while maintaining a degree of self-preservation. The art historian Partha Mitter has described the colonial period in India as the period of "awakening" to the West but also the period of rejection of Western tendencies in favor of nationalist views of art.[7] David Marr has chronicled the 1920s and 1930s in Indochina as the time when "tradition went on trial." In their anti-colonial struggle, intellectuals who fought Westernization argued for a local modernity and a rejection of tradition. Colonial-era evolutionism defined traditions as markers of backwardness. Modernity was not in question, but rather whose it was. In Vietnamese anti-colonial and nationalist views, modernity could be theirs, and it had to be theirs, so as not to make them inherently subservient to the French.

The colonial period of Vietnamese art history, however, is relatively short compared with the colonial eras of other countries in the region, such as the Philippines or India, where Western-style canvas, panel, and oil painting arrived early in the history of contacts between the colonial empire and the native population.[8] The Ecole des Beaux-Arts d'Indochine closed in 1945 after the Japanese coup against the colonial regime. It reopened that same year, but in 1954, under the banner of the newly independent nation of Vietnam, it took on an entirely different purpose. Rid of the unequal relationship between foreigner and native—indeed rid of the foreigner entirely—it also gave its artists a newly gained sense of pride and autonomy in their work. No longer feeling inferior, artists could revel in their status as artist-workers contributing to the making of modern art history. The twenty years that the colonial school was in existence (from 1925 to 1945) was a short time for artists to master a type of oil painting that could be used as a tool of nationalist expression, as had their Chinese and Indian counterparts who had had centuries of training in a variety of painting techniques. The associations made between French and Vietnamese art are somewhat blurred in the writing of art history by Vietnamese scholars, who often don't refer to the French as outsiders. Rather, they tend to appropriate their teachers as forming part of their own painting traditions under the category of "Indochinese art."[9]

Auction houses too have sold paintings by French artists working in Indochina as "Indo-European" artists. A recent book by a French art historian sees the meeting between Western and Vietnamese art as the product of a fruitful exchange or even collaboration between the French and the Indochinese.[10] Taking a closer look at the poor living conditions of the native population as compared with those of the French and at the limited educational opportunities available to the Vietnamese, it is hard to imagine that there was any equality in the relationship between Vietnamese artists and their teachers. Nor is it easy to picture a scenario in which nationalist sentiments were brewing in the art school, considering that the teacher-pupil relationship was one of respect for elders. The Vietnamese who attended the school were most likely the products of French schooling or the sons (and a few daughters) of the Western-educated intellectual elite at best, and colonial collaborators at worst. To be an artist during the colonial period meant serving the French. To attend the school of art was not a natural path toward resistance.

What the colonial period accomplished was to create a bond between artists, a community based on the status of having graduated from the art school. Artists who previously were connected through generations, having learned to paint from their fathers and grandfathers, now learned from their elders, their genealogies traced from teacher to pupil, graduating class to graduating class. The artistic community became an important force after the founding of Vietnam's independent government and the establishment of government-sponsored cultural organizations known as the Fatherland Front. These organizations were managed by executive committees and often run by Communist party members. In 1957, the Artists' Association was created, governed by selected graduates of the colonial art school along with artists who had trained in the barracks of the revolutionary forces. The organization attempted to eradicate differences in the artists' class backgrounds and to eliminate competition by offering similar conditions to all artists: a small stipend, supplies, and opportunities for exhibition space in the association's gallery and national art contests. Military painters from peasant and worker backgrounds were grouped together with artists from urban intellectual elite families who had studied at the colonial school.

To create a unified group of artists based on working-class ideals was not an easy task. In the 1930s, artists essentially formed two groups: one group advocating for artists to resume the role of artisan or worker, and the other calling for a more elitist definition, allowing artists to become "fine painters." These divisions continued and in many ways continue to this day. During the 1950s, however, there were serious political consequences to these divisions. I have written elsewhere on the divisions in the artistic community and their consequences in art history from two different perspectives. One perspective analyzes the way in which certain artists received recognition on a national level for their contributions to the nation and were subsequently termed great artists or national heroes. The other looks at gender differences and the role that women artists play in the artistic community. Both of these perspectives touch on the issue of national and individual identities.

Until the 1950s, artists were commonly referred to as national heroes or great artists on the basis of their contributions to the revolution. To Ngoc Van, for example, a painter who studied at the Ecole, led painting classes in the hills of Viet Bac where Viet Minh troops trained. He was the first to initiate discussions on the role of politics in art and the role of art in politics. He died at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and was awarded the title of revolutionary martyr. He was also listed in all subsequent art anthologies as the "great master of modern art." His title was called into question at the 1994 Congress of the Arts Association, when young painters demanded a change in his status. "He was a terrible painter," said some. "But he was a hero," said others. The divisions fell along the lines of nationalism versus talent, politics versus art. Meanwhile, artists who had not fought in the revolution were being reconsidered for their contributions to art history. One such painter, Bui Xuan Phai, who had rejected all party politics during his lifetime and was often criticized for his lack of participation in the art association activities and his "bourgeois" painting style, in 1996 was given the Ho Chi Minh Prize posthumously for his contribution to Vietnamese culture. The fact that an artist who spent a lifetime rejecting revolutionary values was given the most coveted revolutionary prize illustrates how slippery national labels are.

Bui Xuan Phai presents a very interesting case for understanding all three topics that I wish to address in this essay. He illustrates the ambiguous legacy of colonialism and the contradictory influences of French painting on Vietnamese art. He is also an emblem of the shifting identities of artists within the community and the romantic gazes of foreigners onto Vietnamese art. Born in 1920, he attended the Ecole, graduating with the last class in 1944. He was an avid Francophile. As a student he admired oil paintings by Albert Marquet and tried to emulate the Ecole de Paris style in his signature paintings of old Hanoi streets. His street scenes were deemed too sad and lacked the revolutionary fervor of the socialist-realist paintings favored by the party. Unable to join the official art circles, he spent much of his time in the underground cafes of Hanoi with other artists who chose not to follow the state's ideology. Ideas were exchanged and small art collections were formed. Word about Phai and his friends spread among the few expatriates living in Hanoi after the war during the 1970s and early 1980s. Swedish health care workers and foreign service officers who were stationed in Hanoi came to his home to drink and to buy a few of his paintings. It was technically not permitted for Vietnamese to sell goods to foreigners, but the reality was that everyone had a petty market trade on the side, including artists. Last year an exhibition of Phai paintings in Swedish collections recalled the interactions between Swedes and Vietnamese artists during this time. I gave a lecture in Stockholm for the occasion, and those who lent their works to the show are now highly ranked foreign ministry officers. Over dinner they recalled their evenings with Phai and told stories about buying some of his paintings for a few kroner.

Bui Xuan Phai, seascape. Phai, who graduated from art school in the last year of its administration under the French, became known for his defiance of post-colonial, revolutionary, socialist regulations on art. His work was not accepted by the cultural authorities until shortly before his death in 1988. He painted in isolation for most of his life but is revered as the father of modernist painting in Vietnam.

Phai's paintings are now worth tens of thousands of dollars on the auction market, but they are also exceedingly rare. In the early 1990s, when Western tourists were beginning to travel to Vietnam, Phai's work began to take on new meaning. As Vietnam began to modernize, tourists showed signs of romanticizing Vietnam's past and projected feelings of nostalgia onto Phai's street paintings. The demand for his work grew rapidly, and dealers were soon trading more Phais than he ever painted. Unwittingly, tourists and art collectors were paying large sums of money for fake Phais, making his impersonator one of the highest paid artists in Vietnam. Soon the market became saturated with paintings signed Phai, with no one willing to take responsibility for producing the fakes. Nor were the authorities willing to separate the real from the counterfeit. Even Phai's widow expressed concern over the fakes but would not sign certificates of authenticity.

The fakes damaged Vietnamese art history in several ways. Collectors quickly dismissed all Phais and his value began to fall in the auction market, in spite of the auction houses' attempts to invent "certified" Phais. Because no one in Vietnam was willing to declare which Phais were real—even though most of the community knew exactly who was making which Phais—catalogues and archives for individual artists will be difficult to take seriously in the future. Secondly, it undermined Phai's "greatness" and raised doubts about whether one could ever answer the very question raised in the title of this essay. But more than harming Vietnamese art history, the fake Phais also tell us something about how art gets collected in Vietnam and how outsiders view Vietnamese art.

Fake Phais say something about both the complicity of the art community and its divisions. Those artists who would not point a finger at their colleagues who were involved in scribbling Phai's name on their own street scenes did so not solely out of loyalty and friendship, but also out of fear of having fingers pointed at themselves. Some artists told me they were angry about the fakes; others felt that that was the way the market worked and that all artists did what they could to earn a living. Most artists feared that denouncing the fakes would reveal that all artists were in essence a sham, that they were all guilty of producing works to please foreigners. So it was best that they let it be.

In the process, Phai's identity changed. He was transformed from an impoverished painter adored by the West and a hero in the eyes of a younger generation of painters into a pastiche, a cliché, and a victim of the art market.

Artists' identities change within the art community in the face of historical change. The artists who are most affected by historical change are women artists. Few attended the colonial-period art school because neither the Confucian nor the French system encouraged education for women. Women represented more than half of the enrollment from the 1950s to the 1980s. Now they still represent approximately fifty percent of the art student population, but the number of women artists who are able to earn high incomes from their art or participate in the global art market is roughly about ten percent. From the 1950s to the 1980s, women were encouraged to enroll in school and fill some of the gap left by their husbands, brothers, and fathers who went off to war. Although women participated in the war effort, many chose to stay behind to take care of their children. The art school offered many of them an opportunity to work and raise children in relatively calm surroundings. Women joined the arts association, participated in national competitions, and exhibited alongside their male peers in relatively equal numbers.

Much of this has changed today as a consequence of the art market. During the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and early '80s women gained the status of "art workers" along with their male peers. They continued, however, to be the primary caregivers of their children and to run their households. The market reforms that were instituted in the mid-1980s did not change women's incomes dramatically since many of them had run businesses and market trade on the side throughout the previous decades. But the economic changes tilted the gender balance as more men, including artists, were opening businesses and giving up their state jobs. Many male artists started to create work for sale to foreign investors and became full-time artists, exhibiting in galleries and meeting their clientele. Women artists, on the other hand, often kept their state salaries for security and gave up their artistic ambitions, leaving the men, in essence, to be "great" artists. Most did not give up art altogether, but, as they explained to me, it was difficult to have two "great" artists in one family. Many chose to sacrifice their ambitions in favor of their husbands' careers. Since most women artists were married to artists whom they had met while in art school, many of them decided that in the new competition for sales of art works to foreigners they would defer to their husbands. Those who did succeed in gaining recognition were often either single, divorced, or widowed.

To defer to one's husband smacks of Confucianism. The reality, however, was more complex than that. During the war years, male artists like Bui Xuan Phai and To Ngoc Van gained their reputations on the basis of whether or not they participated in the revolution. Women, since they were denied an education under colonialism, were mostly members of the party and recognized the party's policies as beneficial to their status as artists. Men did not need the party to be artists. Therefore, after the reforms of the mid-1980s, which allowed for more freedom of expression and less constraint by the party, women artists were rejected by the rising generation of artists, who saw them as "party artists" or "revolutionary" artists along with To Ngoc Van. Women artists had no Bui Xuan Phai. Phai was the product of counter-revolutionary intellectual thought. Furthermore, he was able to paint mostly because his wife supported him. When galleries opened for business in the 1980s, there were few women artists around who had spent the past decades experimenting with modernism and therefore who could show foreign visitors their unrepressed feelings or their struggles against the status quo. Where were the "great" women artists?

The first exhibition of contemporary Vietnamese art to take place outside of Vietnam capitalized on this idea of unleashing repressed emotions. Entitled Uncorked Soul, organized by the Plum Blossoms gallery in 1991 in Hong Kong, the exhibition showcased artists who, in the organizers' view, went against the socialist-realist grain of party artists. The show gave the impression that artists in Vietnam had been suppressed and were craving to release their emotions. Consequently few women artists were present. Women artists were not satisfied with this view of the art community. Most of them did not feel especially loyal to the party nor did they feel the need to paint large colorful canvases like their male peers. They felt that the art market suddenly embraced male artists because males were available to talk to potential customers. Male artists pushed their way through the door. Many of the women also felt that the Western world equated art with maleness, and therefore it never went looking for women artists. The way I look at it, the situation resonates with Trinh T. Minh Ha's double bind. To be a Vietnamese artist is already to be "other." To be a Vietnamese woman artist is to be doubly "other" and therefore easily ignored. Asian women artists are equated with craft making, not revolutionary painting. While women figured prominently in art, they were rarely seen as painters. The international art world glamorized the exotic features of Vietnamese women in demanding nudes and portraits in increasing numbers, but rarely were the art works of women featured in exhibitions and galleries. One notable exception was the work of Dinh Y Nhi, who gained a reputation over the course of a few years in the early 1990s as the token young woman artist with a mission to change gender stereotypes. Mostly, however, she was fighting the way in which women artists were treated in the art world. Her parents are painters and she saw the restrictions on them in the 1980s as opposed to the situation in the 1960s, when they taught at the art school. "My father can't compete with young artists today," she said, "so I thought I would."[11]

Nhi's work is mostly about body image. She paints portraits of her friends in black and white. She only paints women and girls, but her figures are emaciated sticks with long, drawn faces. She chooses to rid them of color because she wants to rid her work of the gender associations of color in Vietnamese culture. Red, worn by most women at their weddings, for example, is equated with happiness, purple with fidelity, green with hope, yellow with the emperor. She has said she does not like the current definitions of beauty or the way women are portrayed in glossy magazines. "We are continuously being told about what a beautiful Vietnamese woman looks like. You have to have this nose or those eyes. I decided to just paint lines and circles like a small child would."

Dinh Y Nhi, Girls, 1994, gouache on paper. Nhi is a young woman artist who chooses to paint in black and white as a way of rejecting Vietnamese associations between color and cultural values, especially feminine ones. She aims to challenge male stereotypical views of beauty in drawing women as stick figures.

Although Nhi successfully fought off female stereotypes in art, she did not continue to attract attention from international galleries. Many Vietnamese artists enjoy a brief period in the limelight, but they have to face the fact that they aren't always going to earn a living from their art, especially when their clients are mostly foreign. Since the opening of the economy to foreign investment, prices for art works have risen dramatically and are mostly set for a foreign clientele. As a consequence, there is no domestic audience for art, and artists tend to create art that pleases outsiders rather than their own public. Most art works leave the country, and what there is in galleries doesn't interest most Vietnamese. Artists tend to view the galleries as elevated tourist shops. In the early 1990s, art was sold in tourist shops, and now these tourist shops have become galleries. Galleries tend to exhibit dozens of artists at one time. Not only do artists and dealers treat Vietnamese art as a glorified tourist commodity but often buyers, sometimes unconsciously, do too. This includes international dealers or galleries abroad exhibiting Vietnamese art.

The kind of language used in exhibition catalogues often echoes the language used in tourist pamphlets. The first article to promote tours to Vietnam called it the "Virgin Flower of Asia." Art galleries selling Vietnamese art in Hong Kong and Singapore label Vietnamese art as quaint, folkloric, untouched by modernity. Vietnamese landscapes, painted or otherwise, are called pristine, unspoiled, and pure. There is an aura of innocence affixed to Vietnamese art. Because it has not been part of international exhibition circuits for very long, few people have been aware of Vietnamese art and so it carries a quality of newness.[12] But attached to that idea is the notion of its appeal as a product untainted by postmodernist anxiety and the suggestion therefore that Vietnamese art is more authentic than its more derivative, recycled, and jaded counterparts in Europe and America. Vietnamese paintings also seem to capture an idyllic view of Asia in contrast to the rapidly developing urban centers of Southeast Asia such as Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur. Vietnamese art also differs from art in Indonesia and Thailand, which has been seen by Westerners as too European because it drew on Western models of modernity in the earlier part of the twentieth century.

Because they have the potential for earning large sums of money for their art in a capitalist world, artists have played a key role in the development of Vietnam's economy over the past decade. This aspect of Vietnamese art has been largely underplayed in articles written about Vietnamese painters in the popular press and in art magazines. Understandably, galleries are in the business of selling paintings, not in reflecting on the effect of capitalism on Vietnam. Moreover, the art world not only believes in art for profit but also sustains itself on market speculations and the hype of certain artists over others, while denying that an art market exists. The fact that Vietnamese artists have only recently joined the global capitalist art trade provides an interesting example of how a market for art develops. The Vietnamese art market can be charted historically. During the colonial period, artisans worked for their French teachers and acquired a French clientele for their work. During the independence period, guidelines were developed for artists to work for the state, and they were essentially the clients of the government. In recent years, artists have been able to sell their works once again to a foreign clientele, but in some cases they have more freedom to choose to whom they sell their work as a consequence of more liberal economic policies on the part of the state.

Economists may see Vietnamese artists' entrance into a capitalist art market as an inevitable step toward modernity and development, but the art market presents also a number of problems to Vietnamese artists. When they were sheltered from the international art world, artists desired to be part of it, but they also knew what their purpose was in their own country by the fact that they were discouraged from selling their work. In other words, they knew who their patron was: the state, regardless of whether they decided to satisfy their patron's wishes. When Vietnam entered a period of market reforms and artists were allowed to sell their work to foreigners, their patrons were less well known. Tourists were the first to buy Vietnamese paintings, but no two tourists were the same. When international dealers came around, artists, having not traveled abroad themselves, had a difficult time telling the difference between one dealer and the other. Cultural misunderstandings could not be avoided, fears of being cheated were common, and confusion over whom to please, what to paint, and whom to trust were prominent. In this climate artists have created a product that seems somewhat generically safe to art critics abroad. Beautiful women, landscapes, and local motifs disguised under generous coats of color paint and expressionistic styles are the most popular types of paintings sold in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City galleries today.

The fact that the audience for Vietnamese art today is largely a foreign one is a serious problem for many Vietnamese artists. Certainly, artists often feel that they have sold out to strangers, but they are also aware of the art historical damage it will do. The more paintings are created for an outside audience, the more likely the paintings will leave the country. The more paintings leave, the more they will be forgotten and the less they will contribute to building local art historical traditions. Furthermore, this relationship between foreign patron and Vietnamese artist eerily resembles the colonial paradigm of the previous century. This disturbing fact has caused some artists in the past few years to boycott international exhibitions and attempt to reclaim Vietnamese art for themselves. The economic disparities between foreigners and Vietnamese are still strong. Artists are beginning to see themselves as slaves to the global art trade and yearn for a more genuine, locally produced identity. This is why analyzing the role of the artist becomes crucial and why a historical analysis of the evolution of painting must include an understanding of the shifting identities of artists themselves as they move from being subject to colonial patronage to being participants in the global market.

Examining Vietnamese art outside this historical context, in the search for a great artist and the like, misses both the social life of painting and the social life of painters. Both features are central to understanding the art that was made in twentieth-century Vietnam and the artists who have been celebrated for making it. This is why I had to take an ethnographer's approach in trying to piece together the art history of twentieth-century Vietnam, and also why I must go beyond Vietnam for my follow-up project on how globalization influences not just the marketing but also the making of Vietnamese art. While that is a separate topic, I hope to have suggested some perspectives on the practice of art history in Southeast Asia that make marginal places like Vietnam central to connecting a discipline such as art history with an area focus like Southeast Asia in a way that benefits the study of all three.

NOTES

1. Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been no Great Women Artists" in Linda Nochlin, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 147-158.

2. Alice Yang, Why Asia? Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art, Jonathan Hay and Mimi Young, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1998); John Clark, Modern Asian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998).

3. Nora A. Taylor, Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004).

4. Nora A. Taylor, "The Artist and the State: The Politics of Painting and National Identity in Hanoi, Vietnam, 1925-1995," Ph.D. doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, 1997.

5. Nora A. Taylor, "Orientalism/Occidentalism: The Founding of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d'Indochine and the Politics of Painting in Colonial Vietnam, 1925-1945," Crossroads 11 (2): 1-33.

6. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

7. See Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Patrick Flores, Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (Manila: University of Philippines Press, 1998).

8. Patrick Flores talks of Spanish missionaries teaching Filipinos how to paint church frescoes in the Philippines as early as the sixteenth century. Similarly, Partha Mitter describes the impact of British painting in India in the nineteenth century.

9. See for example Nguyen Quang Phong's Nhung Hoa Si Truong Cao Dang My Thuat Dong Duong (The painters of the Indochina School of Fine Arts) (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban My Thuat, 1992).

10. Nadine Andre-Pallois, L'Indochine: lieu d'echange culturel? (Paris: EFED, 1968).

11. Personal communication with the artist, April 1994.

12. In one of the first articles about travel to Vietnam since the war, Pico Iyer describes Vietnam as having the "bashful charm of a naturally alluring girl stepping out into bright sunlight after years of dark seclusion," falling vaguely short of calling it the "virgin flower of Asia," in Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World (New York: Vintage Departures, 1993). In an essay in Fine Contemporary Vietnamese Art, Poetic Reflections, Judith Hughes-Day, ed. (Hong Kong: La Vong Gallery, 1994), Ian Findlay-Brown describes Vietnamese art as having a "graciousness and a quixotic charm that seems somehow out of kilter with many of the aggressive, highly politicized, and socially conscious statements that have been so much a part of recent contemporary art around the world." "Coming into its Own: Contemporary Vietnamese Art," 24.