By NGUYEN QUI DUC
APRIL
27, 2014
HANOI,
Vietnam — More and more state-owned enterprises in Vietnam, from banks to
shipbuilders, are being turned over to private hands. Government-run television
stations broadcast competing commercials for consumer goods. For some urban
families, weekly trips to megamalls and KFC have become de rigueur. In cafes or
on social websites, the young show off branded clothes, electronic toys and
photos of trips abroad — while in the streets loudspeakers blare out news of
party meetings and decrees.
Communism
and capitalism make awkward bedfellows, especially when it comes to culture.
The government continues to monitor art exhibitions and music shows, films and
TV programs, books and CDs. In classic Communist tradition, it still officially
bans “offenses against the state” (an all-encompassing and ill-defined crime),
violations of custom (like mannequins without underwear) or behavior it deems
deviant (like hair dyed in bright colors). But the new enforcers of these old
restrictions are driven less by ideological purity than by a mixed bag of
political correctness and market-driven concerns — and this may be hampering
artistic creation more than conventional censorship did under classically
Communist governments.
For
years after the Communists took power in the mid-1950s, party leaders would
spell out the limits of what was culturally acceptable. Their mind-set was
patriarchal, authoritarian and suspicious. Dull bureaucrats with dull minds
would debate a song’s patriotic fervor or a painting’s shades of red. Artists
were expected to extol the party’s determination during the war against America
and portray the people of reunified Vietnam as peaceful and contented.
In
reality, many Vietnamese suffered terribly during the postwar years, thanks
largely to a mismanaged central economy. By the mid-1980s, even the Politburo
had taken note, and it began a policy called Doi Moi, or Renovation. Some
private enterprise was allowed. Farmers could set their own production rates
and prices. The country opened up to tourism. Official shackles on culture were
also loosened: It was now in the government’s interest to let writers and
painters describe the social problems the state was professing to fix.
It
was during these laxer days, in 1989, that I first came back to Vietnam. (Like
many Vietnamese from the South, I had left at the end of the war.) I met many
local artists who were eagerly turning their backs on Soviet-style socialist
realism. Painters were embracing abstraction. Writers like Nguyen Minh Chau,
Bao Ninh and Nguyen Huy Thiep were detailing not the heroics of war but its
horrors, and the enduring hardships of living in post-conflict Vietnam.
By
the mid-1990s, however, a new generation of leaders decided they had heard
enough criticism, especially about abuses of power, nepotism and corruption.
The culture ministry began forcing artists to attend “working sessions,”
instructing them to produce more positive images of Vietnam. Renegades were
sanctioned.
An
exhibit of Truong Tan’s tormented homoerotic paintings was taken down; as was
his installation of a giant diaper with the absorbent parts made to look like
the pockets on the uniforms of police officers. Le Quang Ha and Le Hong Thai
made unflattering portraits of politicians, but even when they painted over
them, the faintly discernible silhouettes that remained would earn them
official reprimands.
By
the time I moved to Vietnam, in 2006, protest art had all but faded away. I
opened a gallery in Hanoi seeking out alternative artworks — pieces questioning
the hypocrisy of party policies, the traditional treatment of women, the rising
influence of money. For a couple of years, the police openly followed me
around. Officers would ask me about the intellectuals I met; they would ask my
artist friends about me. Yet the gallery was allowed to stay open, and it still
is today. This is because it caters to a very small audience and has no
ambition to be commercial.
Vietnam
has entered yet another era in its history of cultural control. Forget
apparatchiks with comb-overs and coordinated suits trying to protect the
revolution against degenerate thought. The people who now run Vietnam’s
publishing houses, film festivals and cultural exchange programs are artists —
many of whom were once censored under Communism — and they have been co-opted
by the lure of condos, cars and washing machines.
In
the 1990s, Dang Xuan Hoa was noted for making paintings featuring traditional
ceramic pots or hand-carved wooden furniture set upside down or lying askew;
critics argued that the disarray in the compositions defied the Communists’
insistence on rosy depictions of society. Today, Mr. Hoa’s friends and
colleagues wonder about his role as an officer of the Artists’ Union, which
vets exhibitions and performances.
A
writer whose stories decrying the lack of decency in contemporary Vietnam were
once banned is now a state editor for TV and film scripts. Ten years ago, she
would complain about the cost of making a cellphone call; she now rides around
in a chauffeured S.U.V. Other writers tell me she O.K.’s scripts in exchange
for bribes, using her connections with state authorities to bypass
restrictions.
One
gallery owner describes how customs officials and intermediaries invoke vague
cultural proscriptions to prevent her from bringing into the country, or
sending out, unconventional artwork. Yet for the right amount of cash, they
will let almost any piece through. In the old Communist days, strict party
discipline limited bribery. Today, corruption is rampant, and censorship has
become a pretext for extortion.
This
breeds a curious kind of self-censorship. Artists must choose either to produce
noncontroversial, commercial works and pay up, or resign themselves to doing
what they want for a tiny audience. Mainstream art is dumbing itself down while
truly experimental or critical work is becoming increasingly marginal.
The
more avant-garde groups — like the film studio DocLab, the artists’ collective
Nha San Studio, the music school and performance group Dom Dom — protect their
activities from official scrutiny and bribery by registering as design
companies and nonprofit organizations, and working closely with foreign
embassies.
Other
artists go overseas. Lai Thi Dieu Ha and Nguyen Phuong Linh, two young female
painters and performance artists whose works focus on modernization,
displacement and repressed sexuality, are better known abroad than in Vietnam.
The same goes for the painter and performer Tran Luong and the painter and
experimental musician Nguyen Manh Hung, two committed critics of Communism.
For
a time, the country’s embrace of capitalism seemed to promise greater freedom
for the production of art. But under Vietnam’s new artists/censors, the profit
motive is proving even more stifling than political propaganda.
Nguyen
Qui Duc, a journalist who covers Asia, runs the alternative-art space Tadioto
in Hanoi.
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