| Summary: | This dissertation argues that between 1989 and 2002, in the early years of doi moi economic renovation enacted in 1986 in Vietnam, the Hanoi art scene saw radical transformation as modern art became contemporary. Shift was spearheaded, it proposes, by an academically overlooked Hanoi vanguard, in particular Vu Dan Tan and Nguyen Van Cuong, who, with a few other artists, congregated in Hanoi’s first experimental art space, Salon Natasha. To date, the contemporary turn in Vietnamese art has attracted scant academic regard. Dominant scholarship inside and outside Vietnam accounting for art of the doi moi-1990s describes any changes as restrained; or, when considering Vietnamese contemporary art, places the latter’s emergence later, after the Vietnam penetration of global contemporary art, at the turn of the millennium. My thesis challenges these views. Focusing on under-researched 1990s artworks by Vu Dan Tan and Nguyen Van Cuong, it discloses these pieces as crucial linchpins of the contemporary turn, and locates them in Vietnamese art history. My study shows Hanoi vanguard development of new artistic methods that departed then standard painting styles to engage the contemporary condition. It reveals how achieving innovation with little knowledge of global contemporary practices, Tan, Cuong, and their colleagues expanded the confines of modern Vietnamese art to create contemporary art, a body I identify as doi moi-in-art for expressive alterations as revolutionary as doi moi itself.
My study explores the contemporary turn’s connection with artistic negotiation of social reality as, in the wake of doi moi, the old economic order ceded to the new. Having evoked the mainstream that the vanguard departed, my study accounts for vanguard material expansion, alternative modes of circulation, and interdisciplinarity whereby images integrated text, arguing these innovations were tied to social context. It uncovers how and why artworks transformed local codes associated with the village to produce conceptually-based aesthetic languages that involved audiences in critical debate. It establishes how pieces by Tan and Cuong, grappling with the reception of market socialism (or what the artists termed capitalism) in Vietnam, fostered critical idioms. It ends by analysing academically-neglected Salon Natasha to establish the foundational role of the space in Vietnamese art history both as site, and idea.
Through hitherto-untapped primary and archival sources on four continents, this thesis demonstrates how 1990s vanguard idioms of Vu Dan Tan, Nguyen Van Cuong, and their colleagues dialogued with the social dynamics of the period to generate contemporary art in Hanoi, and expand the Southeast Asian and global modern.
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