[MUTUAL ART] Vietnamese Women Artists in Performance: Engaging Acts

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URL https://www.mutualart.com/Article/Vietnamese-Women-Artists-in-Performance-/9FA3001C927F929E

Given the relatively small number of women performers at recent performance art events involving Vietnamese artists, such as Ket Noi in Singapore and

Nora Taylor / C-Arts

Jul 01, 2009

Given the relatively small number of women performers at recent performance art events involving Vietnamese artists, such as Ket Noi in Singapore and Cuoc Thi Tai Nang Nghe Thuat Trinh Dien, a Danish Cultural Foundation sponsored Performance Art Competition in Hanoi, just to name the most recent ones, audiences may get the impression that women artists are simply not interested in the medium. Phan Thi Thao Nguyen and Le Thi Minh Nguyet were the only two Vietnamese women artists invited to each event. The apparent lack of participation on the part of women artists, however, only accentuates the male centered nature of the Vietnamese art world, but is not an indication of a scarcity of women performance artists. While, women artists are largely underrepresented in group exhibitions, both local and international, in mainstream galleries and museums, they have nevertheless attended art school in equal numbers and produced many equally, if not more creative, innovative and wide-ranging works. The marginalization of women in art circles, largely informal social organizations, has often encouraged them to push the boundaries further and challenge the status quo. Their so-called outsider position has given them the freedom to experiment and work outside the system. This has meant that notable women artists have often acted alone, creating their own spaces for performance and artistic production. This is especially the case for the four artists presented here.
Ly Hoang Ly, an award winning poet and performance artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, was born in 1975. The daughter of the writer Hoang Hung, she has been staging performance pieces since 2000. She was first introduced to performance through Seiji Shimoda, a Japanese artist, during a visit to Ho Chi Minh City. Seiji Shimoda then invited her to participate in the 2000 Nippon International Performance Art Festival (NIPAF). There, she presented a performance entitled Water in which she filled plastic bags with water and looked at her audience through these plastic bags. She then laid the bags on the ground and smashed them open with a shoe. She chose to execute this piece because her zodiac element is water. She also told me that as a woman, she feels connected to water because the body is primarily made of water. A natural poet, Ly creates solo pieces that are choreographed and designed as single works of long duration which result in conceptually more complex pieces than some of those at workshops and festivals where artists effectively take turns performing short skits. Since this early work, she has participated in performance events and residencies in Korea, Japan and the United States. In 2003, Ly performed with the Cambodian- American artist Anida Yoeu (Esguerra) Ali at Blue Space in Ho Chi Minh City, a very complex piece entitled Pushing Through Borders.

A major piece in her performance work to date has been Monument Round Tray, performed in several Asian cities, in which she uses round metallic serving trays as symbols of servitude. She builds a pyramid out of the trays and proceeds to circumambulate around the structure, grabbing a few along the way, smashing them together aggressively. She also picks up chopsticks that she snaps in two and throws them against the trays. In one variation of the piece, she pasted pornographic images of women onto the trays. The piece is meant as a statement against servitude but it also subtly pays respect to women who serve. As she states “The trays reflect the perseverance of Vietnamese women faced with daily challenges.” The homage is also conveyed in Ly’s gestures of walking around the piece while wearing a home made version of the Ao Dai tunic. This reverence for and reference to femininity while critiquing subservience to men and the male gaze also appears in Blood and Flower, her performance for the exhibition “Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam,” at Mills College Art Museum, California, organized by International Arts and Artists. For that 30 minute performance, Ly brought a box of sanitary napkins with her from Vietnam and affixed them in neat rows on a wall painted red for the occasion. She then laid out a mandala-like circle of napkins on the ground and, while ringing a wooden meditation bell, tiptoed onto the pads, in a circular motion. The piece ended with a smearing of red paint onto several of the napkins. After lying down on top of the piece, she then struck the wooden bell so violently that her baton broke. The piece was a forceful expression of the body while avoiding overt exhibitionism and gratuitous nudity. With these works and others that reference death and hair, Ly projects powerful ideas about womanhood and women’s unique roles in society, yet without resorting to the somewhat overly clichéd association between female performance and issues of identity politics, common in the US.

It is important to draw attention to the ritual aspects of Ly’s performances and references to Buddhism. Although one could not say that meditation is a performance, there are strong meditative elements to all her performances. Performance artists enter a kind of mental space where they shut off the world around them and focus on basic bodily functions such as breathing and in the case of Ly’s Mills College piece, menstruation. As Lynn Charlotte Lu recently suggested in the journal, Future of the Imagination, performance artists experience pain to “know about it” in an empiric way.

References to Buddhism are present in another Vietnamese artist’s work, albeit a different kind of Vietnamese woman. Genevieve Erin O’Brien, born in 1974, just a year before Ly, is a queer Vietnamese-Irish-American interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago who has staged durational performances and one-woman shows in the US and has made works that explicitly reference Buddhism, especially the work of Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. In The Monk who Licked me, Genevieve O’Brien drew inspiration from the monk’s teaching to comment on war and sexual violence against women. Verging on theatre due to its narrative and at times autobiographical elements, her work is also very visual and, like most performance artists, her body is her canvas. Since she embodies both Vietnamese and Irish-American identities, she can use her body to invite viewers to reflect on the collision of those two cultures in war. Using Thich Nhat Hanh’s pacifist activities, she sees performance as a cathartic and therapeutic art form that extends itself outside of her own body, transmitting her message to others. However, other works, like The Peace Salon, require audience participation. Reminiscent of the outdoor sidewalk one-person barbershops common on the streets of Hanoi, she set up a barber chair in the plaza outside of the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a hot muggy July 4 morning in 2008 that attracted participants with a sign offering “free hair cuts.” To set the piece in motion, she proceeded to have her own hair shaved by an assistant and then spent all day shearing heads. Looking like Buddhist monks themselves, the participants were transformed by the experience. She, herself, was awed by the reactions. “Hair is so connected to one’s gender and identity,” she noted, “some participants came so that they could share the sentiments of their loved ones undergoing cancer therapy.” She also attracted homeless people who simply wanted the free hair cut. This kind of performance offers transformation and catharsis but it also draws the viewer into a conversation. Her piece entitled Vietnamese Suitcase carried the conversation further as she traveled to various American cities with a cardboard suitcase and a Vietnamese outfit, she asked bystanders to discuss their feelings about Vietnam.

Issues of sexuality are also apparent in the work of Nguyen Kim Hoang. Born in 1976, Hoang has been making performances as commentary on sexual orientation. She is concerned about the discrimination against homosexuals in Vietnam. One of her installations, World of Pluralism, draws attention to the plight of the gay community, forced into the closet, living a marginal life style. Like Ly, she participated in NIPAF albeit in 2006. There she performed Love’s Hidden Corner, another statement about the secretive nature of homosexuality. For Hoang, performance offers a liberation from social constraints. But, it is rarely visible to the public. Unlike NIPAF that offers artists the freedom to exhibit their bodies in public spaces in whatever way they choose, Vietnamese artists are still subject to censorship and laws on public decency. A show of her photographs was recently censored by the cultural authorities on the grounds it displayed pornographic imagery. This series entitled Closer consisted of shots of fragments of her naked body flooded in red light. Looking more like luscious flesh, shiny curves and round edges, more “arty” than obscene, they were hardly pornographic. Erotic maybe, but not overtly sexual. The authorities’ reaction to the photographs prompted a writer, Nguyen Nhu Huy, to devote several pages on his blog to Vietnamese society’s relationship with love and lust and the lack of faith in artists.

Another artist Ngo Thai Uyen performed a piece which may well be the first in which a woman artist from Vietnam performs in the nude. This work was again created abroad for the 2002 NIPAF festival. In 2004, she and other performance artists were questioned by the police after occupying an empty store front space to stage their work. The cultural authorities are still uncomfortable with performance art, especially when it takes place in public spaces but it has not been dismissed altogether, nor banned outright. As the Ho Chi Minh City artist, Rich Streitmatter-Tran said “the Ministry of Culture is still not sure what to make of performance art, but it is forced to deal with it.” Street performances, however, are still not tolerated as they break the country’s laws on disrupting the peace, holding meetings in public spaces and morality laws. Several of the artists expressed gratitude for NIPAF since as Hoang said: “We still have to break one barrier in performance art, and that is the street.” It is no accident that these women largely live and work in Ho Chi Minh City which is considered peripheral to Vietnamese traditional culture by the government. Artists here often feel neglected and marginalized by their peers in the capital of Hanoi. The flip side of this marginality is that artists tend to experiment more freely.

In spite of Singapore’s tight restrictions on art in public spaces as well, local artist Amanda Heng has managed to perform in the streets there. Amanda Heng’s work may set a model to look forward to for Vietnam, but for the time being, hers and the Indonesian artist Arahmaiani’s performances can only offer these artists a model for free expression and a potential new method for sending provocative messages about historical and social memory, peace, and sexuality. While Arahmaiani, Amanda Heng and Genevieve O’Brien have all produced engaged participatory performances with a public on the street, Vietnam-based artists like Ly Hoang Ly, Ngo Thai Uyen and Nguyen Kim Hoang have to operate in the private sphere unless they are invited abroad to perform. Although they do not have a large audience and are rarely seen by the wider Vietnamese public, their empathy and physical renditions of social conditions have succeeded in elevating art beyond the paradigm of identity and gender.