The (Calli)graphic Regimes of Contemporary Vietnamese Art

Abstract In 1990s Hanoi, Vietnam, many contemporary artists navigated the written form as crucial to the logic of the pictorial field. These included Vũ Dân Tân (1946-2009), Trương Tân (b. 1963), and Nguyễn Văn Cường (b. 1973), among others. I examine these artistic experiments as integral to what many have hailed as the emergence of contemporary art in Vietnam, linked to the early effects of globalization and the impetus to freely engage with questions of selfhood following over forty years of a socialist realist mandate. However, I also suggest the significance of site to these practices, in particular the postsocialist graphic regime of the urban environment, with its traces of historical inscriptions, influx of commercial signage, and ubiquitous public propaganda posters that continue to coat the surfaces of cities today. The artworks discussed in this essay drove new understandings of art, particularly in the use of line and text to situate artistic expression as part of but also apart from the urban surfaces and graphic materials on and in which such unorthodox actions were enacted. As such, the (calli)graphic regime marked a radical shift in perceptions of what could be art in 1990s Vietnam.