BUI CONG KHANH – A CONTEMPORARY ART VOICE OF VIETNAMESE SOCIAL ISSUES

The contemporary art movement in Vietnam began at the very end of the 20th century. It can be said that this art movement is influenced by aesthetic thoughts known as “post modern” as well as art methods and media such as installation, performance art, video art, and mix-media. The essential condition for the birth of the Vietnamese contemporary movement was based on the fact that several young artists had no more loyal ties to “socialist realism”, which was supported by the Vietnamese Government. Meanwhile, they were strongly influenced by Western aesthetic theories and contemporary art practices through deepened and widened exchanges with Western artists.  Bui Cong Khanh, whose art practice encompasses paintings, performance art, installation art and video arts, was among them.

Khanh was born in 1972 in Danang, the biggest city in central Vietnam and the third largest city in the country. After graduating with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Oil painting in 1998 at the Fine-Arts University of Ho Chi Minh City, he came back to his hometown and opened a salon gallery in Hoi An, an ancient tourist town about an hour drive from Danang, to earn a living by selling his lacquer and oil paintings to tourists. In that way, Khanh joined the majority of young artists in Vietnam at that time, who were still confined to easel painting, which was influenced by impressionism, expressionism, and abstract paintings. They aimed to sell their salon paintings to the western market. Nora A. Taylor discusses this phenomena:

“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 today¹.”

However, Khanh still nurtured his ambition by engaging himself with some colleagues in Ho Chi Minh City to practice experimental contemporary art that called attention to Vietnam’s social issues, as it opened its trade markets towards globalization. This led to his decision to close the salon gallery in 2005 and move to Ho Chi Minh City to join the vivid contemporary art scene which included the “Young Artists Club” of Ho Chi Minh City Fine-Arts Association and “Blue Space” – an independent contemporary Art Center where international and Viet Kieu, (or overseas Vietnamese), artists premiered their art.

Khanh’s artistic practice has been formed in the context described by Nora A. Taylor: “By 2000, Vietnamese artists were beginning to engage in conversations about contemporary art through Internet forums and as participants in international symposia. I witnessed many of the dramatic transformations that took place over the next decade in the contemporary Vietnamese art world. Artists grew increasingly familiar with art trends from around the world and experimented with different media such as installation, performance, film, and video².”

The main theme in Khanh’s work is the social contradiction brought by the process of modernization in Vietnamese society. His earlier work critiqued these issues in more simple and direct terms, but more complex in his later work. For example, in  Khanh’s first performance art piece Traffic performed in 2002, he lied motionless on his back in red liquid he spilled onto the floor earlier. Audiences circled around him as they witness the performance of an accident. The only sound that filled the small room where Khanh performed was from his mouth, eminating like sounds of a siren. This simple and literal work conveyed the unorganized traffic system in Vietnam and victims of traffic accidents – a critical issue arising from spontaneous urbanization in Vietnam post-Doi Moi period³. In the piece Dollar Man in 2004, Khanh completely covered his face with fake 100-dollar bills in U.S. currency as an action to criticize the dominance of materialism and capitalism in Vietnam. Recent years, he has produced large ceramic vases which have hand-painted traditional patterns mixed with his contemporary drawings of people, objects, and texts expressing contemporary Vietnamese society. Choosing Bat Trang, a traditional handcraft ceramic producers’ village near Hanoi to work on with the vases, he sells them to foreign collectors. It is as tough Khanh blew a breath of contemporary air into the handicraft world of Vietnam and, at the same time, highlighted the contrast between the beauty of tradition and the need for change. In doing so, he raised the question: how can all of these factors live together?

Class issues, the gap between poor and rich people, has been arising during the process of modernization in Vietnam.  In Khanh’s installation The Past Moved – an interactive photo-studio and photographs shown in Singapore on 2010 and 2011⁴, he takes a deeper look at these class issues. Using a large scale charcoal paper drawing of neighboring slum as the backdrop, Khanh shot photos of the slum residents and his other acquaintances to convey the difference in reactions and poses between people who belonged to the slum and people who were unfamiliar with the backdrop drawings: the first ones looked casual and natural while the latter looked too serious or awkward. He then reinstalled the charcoal slum backdrop installation in a gallery along with these photos. 

Here is how Khanh describes his work: 

“The Past Moved” is one of my ways to note the so-called history. I use this word “so called history” to mention a hurry development of a country that has just got through the war, and had been closed to the out world during such a long time… I hope that any one who see that background of that slum can relate it to his own past that passed, or a place where the truth and the unreal are both really moved to the past⁵.”

One could say that some Vietnamese contemporary artists like Khanh are fighting a “guerilla-like war” to raise their voice against government policies that they find absurd, arbitrary, and violates basic human rights. This can be noticed as a voice of soft, moderate, or indirect boldness. Khanh’s performance Stamp Me can be an example of this statement. 

He used two seals engraved “Yes” or “No” to stamp his body as he alternated the stamps. Then he offered the audience the option of imprinting “Yes” or “No” onto the artist’s body. This performance art piece can be perceived as a metaphor of censorship in Vietnam where every product of art and literature, even their authors have to go through a rigorous regulation and approval system. 

In Khanh’s latest solo exhibition: For Home and Country, organized on February 2013 at YAVUZ gallery in Singapore, he grappled with the battle between individualism and collectivism. In this show, Khanh installed his works in two separate rooms. One room included seven large oil paintings landscapes of the countryside in Southern Vietnam. Khanh used the “cheap painting form”⁶, that were popular in the locality, to these paintings. It seems that he wanted his work to be understood by everyday people rather than presenting an absurd conceptual art form to them. On the other hand, these paintings shown in a country like Singapore, whose audience is more exposed to comtemporary art, can be seen as the artist’s intention to present the art comprehension of most Vietnamese today.

The paintings depict real countryside homes void of its owners’ images. A red banner across these landscapes, states Quyết tâm xây dựng gia đình văn hoá (Determined to build a well-cultured family) or Khu vực văn hoá bình yên (Peaceful well-cultured zone)⁷ stands out. The banners in this painting series can be seen as another form of the stamp used in Khanh’s Stamp Me performance: the moral scale based on governmental evaluation is imposed onto a community. Moreover, Khanh placed ceramic plates next to paintings. These plates have hand painted-portraits of each homeowner behind the government mass certification of a “Well-Cultured House” – a gesture to accentuate individualism. While what these countryside citizen get is a vague and imaginary title given by a governmental office displaying a hollow and contrived piece of certificate, Khanh’s plates represents a meaningful and honorable piece of appreciation given by an individual/artist to an individual/homeowner. Khanh said, “I made these plates as a present to them, to honor them⁸.”

Commitment Culture, a swinging doorway, from a slum house in Saigon that was demolished due to gentrification, connects the two rooms of Khanh’s For Home and Country exhibition. He laser-cut the text from “The Well Cultured Family Commitment Form” – a set of government rules applied to civic duties and family responsibilities. The letters from the cut out were placed in a lacquer engraved box and the audience could rearrange the letters to create a new body of words. Again, the audience played the game of individualism versus collectivism.

In the second room of the show was Saigon Slum – the combination of a miniature movie-like installation of video art and photographs, describing the living condition of poor people in the slums of Saigon. It is clear that Saigon Slum installation was developed from Khanh’s previous installation, The Past Moved. However, the new piece conveyed not only the gap of poor and wealthy classes in Vietnam, but also the spirit of collectivism with its governmental force and societal will to control all individual behaviors: the artist installed two infrared cameras to monitor the audience entering the installation room and their footsteps. This surveillance is shown onto two TV screens as live black and white videos, creating an uncomfortable and alarmed atmosphere, to demonstrate an atmosphere of state surveillance. 

Overall, in his art practice, Bui Cong Khanh combines contemporary art, methods and concepts with Vietnam’s history and national resources as well as issues of modernity and the nation-state during the era of globalization. One can see Vietnamese artists like Khanh and Viet Kieu artists like Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Dinh Q. Le and Tiffani Chung, who choose to live in Vietnam and create art, are going down the same road, but from the opposite end and all of them join at the intersections of transnational and national. Nora A.Taylor writes:

“Over time, this dialogue will attract the attention of increasing numbers of curators from around the world, and doors will open for both local and Viet Kieu artists. Eventually, the distinction between a Viet Kieu and a Vietnamese artist will dissolve, and the former’s increased visibility in international exhibitions will transform, in turn, their relationship to Vietnam and the way this theme is articulated in their work⁹.”

While Viet Kieu artists grew up in a western cultural environment, educated at contemporary schools of art, and then returning to Vietnam, using the country as their inspiration and its resources for their art practice, Bui Cong Khanh was born and raised in Vietnam with a Vietnamese education. He converted the “language” of Vietnamese art into western contemporary language. From 2002 until now, he has joined numerous international art exhibitions in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore, Germany, America, and Australia. Khanh is a case study of an artist who went quickly beyond the confines of his province to reach the world areana of contemporary art. However, because his international exhibitions outnumber his national exhibitions, his work and where it can be displayed reveals that Khanh’s art faces issues of censorship and limited spectatorship in Vietnam. This issue continues in the Vietnamese art scene. Many Vietnamese art critics say it will take at least a few more decades for contemporary artists like Bui Cong Khanh to be able to motivate and inspire Vietnamese people through their art, as a result of state control and the lack of art education in Vietnam due to government controls. However, the future of Vietnamese contemporary art is being built a brick at a time through the hardwork of contemporary artists like Khanh and his colleagues, creating the foundation for the next generation. Efforts like Khanh draws hope for political and social change in Vietnam and at the same time depicts the loneliness of one man’s search for change in his country.
Ly Hoàng Ly 2013

 

Cited Sources:

1. Nora A. Taylor, “Why Have There Been No Great Vietnamese Artists?” (Ann Arbor, MI, MPublishing, University of Michigan Library Winter 2005).
2. Nora A. Taylor, “Running the Earth: Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s Breathing is Free: 12,756.3”.
3. Doi moi is the name given to the economic reforms initiated in Vietnam in 1986 with the goal of creating a “socialist-oriented market economy“.
4. “The Past Moved” was exhibited in Singapore’s Esplanade during the “Making History” show curated by Iola Lenzi in May 2010 and in 2011 at the Singapore Art Museum.
5. The artist statement of “The Past Moved”.
6. The term used by Bui Cong Khanh – Personal conversation with the artist, 2013
7. Iola Lenzi, “For Home and Country: new social installations by Bui Cong Khanh”, curator Statement.
8. Personal conversation with the artist, 2013
9. Nora A. Taylor, “Running the Earth: Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s Breathing is Free: 12,756.3”.