The Three-dimensional Matrix of Engagements

The Cases of Việt Nam

As socially engaged art referred to collaborativity, participatory, and involving people in the art-making process, the social context would decide the way people engage with each other in the art scene. In the context of Việt Nam, art is in general out of the social gaze caused by a nonexistence of art infrastructure, an unpredictable censorship, and a dilemma of commodifying art and controlling artistic criticism towards the society. Under this circumstance, art that seeks to position itself by engaging with the society with different strategies that discloses suprising. While the showcase of Việt Nam displays Âm Sáng by Nguyễn Huy An, Art Forever! by Nguyễn Đức Đạt and Laurent Serpe, and Que Faire by Nguyễn Trinh Thi, this essay seeks to elaborate with the temporal engagement of the artists and proposes a model of engagement in the three-dimensional matrix – the past, the present, and the parallel, thus enlarges the common understand of social engagement in art practising. 

The Past Dimension

Being wrapped under cultural layers of tradition, Âm Sáng [Yin Light] by Nguyễn Huy An unveils a subtle beauty rising from an inheritance relationship in making art between artist generations – the old and the young, the tradition and the postmodern, the vanishing and the upcoming in facing changes. Facinated in traditional performing arts [tuồng and chèo], Huy An spent years to seek for a deep understanding of traditional arts and to reserve aesthetical values of the past. In doing so, the contemporary artist turned the items he got from the traditional artists into the site-specific installation Âm Sáng realized at Galerie Quỳnh in Sài Gòn 2019. Excerpted from Âm Sáng, the objects of the show – the mirror and the tale of the hair – are the results of a trusty relationship based on a good faith belief of the older generation in the younger one.  

The mirror is the makeup tool that Huy An received as a present from the tuồng actress Mẫn Thị Thu and the tale of the hair is the story about the artist’s unsuccessful journey in searching for the legendary long hair of the chèo actress Thuý Ngần, following her narration. Given these traditional operas were promoted as propaganda instruments and institutionalized within the subsided system, the opera artists were privileged as state workers until the economic reform so-called Đổi Mới in the late 1980s. Amongst those, there were passionate artists who devoted their lives to these art forms like the two actresses did. However, after Đổi Mới, the traditional operas were cut off from the subsidy; and the only national broadcasting is fulfilled with Vietnamese, Chinese and Korean soap operas, and American blockbuster movies. The bond between traditional arts and society was completely removed. Traditional performances become exotic products, theatres are dying out, so are fervent artists. In an honour gesture, the two obsolete actresses gifted Huy An their beloved belongings accompanying their lifelong profession as the over-handed tokens in a relay race with speedy social changes. Such honour gesture was eventually transformed respectfully into the visible and invisible artworks Chân dung Hồ Nguyệt [the Portrait of Madame Hồ Nguyệt] and Tóc [Hair] as showcased.

The Present Dimension

In a different manner, the socially engaged in Que Faire [What to Do] by Nguyễn Trinh Thi appears in a collective performance of sixteen contemporary artists including herself. As a sequel to Unsubtitled in a trio series, Que Faire is resulted from Trinh Thi’s studies on the issues of the role and position of the artists in the Vietnamese society. Reflecting on the 1950s-Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm, the artist sees the suppressed literary movement as the only instance of widespread intellectual dissidence ever to occur in North Vietnam and projects her reflection towards the current society in the video installation Que Faire. To explore possibilities of preserving differences of individuals while creating a sense of collective experience as stated, Trinh Thi invited the other artists to join the performance and turned it into an assembly of individuals, in which one is standing in silence, then undressing and dressing themselves after another until the last as an act of thinking and unthinking on what to do in particular situations.  

The gathering presented in Que Faire, however, in my view, not only scrutinizes the realm of individuality and collectivity but challenges the notion of privacy and publicity in different times and spaces of the current society. The still un-/dressing itself is a human act that could be mostly seen in either privacy or custody. Depending on either space, the setting of privacy or publicity would be outlined. Likewise, the time in the artwork is parted into the duo: day and night. While each performer is framed in a singular black surrounded by silence suggests a night time, the casual sound in the surroundings reveals the opposite. Such presentation raises questions on the boundary of time spectrums in which privacy and publicity could be defined. Overall, the ambivalence in defining the borderline between private and public spheres is testing the limit of social controls and personal exposures in the face of different controlling apparatuses, in both political and technical meanings. “Big brother is watching you” in Orwell’s dystonia becomes threatening, more than ever in this sense.

The Parallel Dimension

Taking to another dimension of engagement, Art Forever! [Nghệ Thuật Muôn Năm] by Nguyễn Đức Đạt and Laurent Serpe involved with ghosts during the making and happening. Ensued from the art week Nổ Cái Bùm 2020 in Huế – a city in Central Việt Nam, the object installation performance was a response from the regional tradition of worshiping and offering votives to the lively spirits bustling in town. Thinking of other deceased artists, the two artists wanted to send art materials to their friends in the other world but found no artist supplies available in the market for the deads. This reality reflects a nonexistence in social perception on the artists in the both physical and spiritual worlds. Caused by those facts, a fully equipped artist studio was built from colour paper, papier-mâché and cardboard within two weeks by the two artists and friends who specified that those items must be real as they would be truly needed. In the final day of exhibiting, all of the offerings and objects were sent to the artist friends based in another world through an act of burning on the ground of Hue College of Arts. In beforehand, the artists invited the dead friends to come for receiving presents in a ritual ceremony of burning incense and cigarette, and worshipping fruits, flowers and wine. 

Entitled to Art Forever!, the artwork advocates an eternity of art but also teases an upcoming of the contemporary since ‘Art Now’ globally becomes a trendy title in creative and cultural industries. Meanwhile, ‘Muôn Năm’ [Forever] is a wordplay from common slogans in Vietnamese hallowing the longevity of the revolutionary leaders and their immortal political party. Praising Art Forever! becomes an artistic reaction towards such political brainwash and an emphasis on the absent space of art in the Vietnamese society. Making art in a joyfulness caused by “something invaluable and nonsensical” towards commercialization and politicization as artist Nguyễn Đức Đạt said, is then an act of resisting to both local and global determinations on the development of arts.  

Uncertainty of the Future 

Bearing in itself multiple realities, the three-dimensional matrix of engagements in those artworks depicts an uncertain future for arts and culture. In case of Việt Nam, these engagements are carried along a society with the disconnection and destruction of aesthetical and ethical values, the insecurity of human rights, the intimidation of political powers, and the globalizing pressure. Accordingly, those art-making processes question on the position of aesthetics and humans in the future society. Responding to the era of uncertainty, Vietnamese socially engaged art opens up to expanding this kind to both horizontal and vertical directions. In such, the engagement in making art is no more limited within a collaboration among the alive but stretches out to the dead, undergoes from generation to generation, and keeps thinking further about different possibilities.  

Berlin, Feb. 7th 2022

Bùi Kim Đĩnh