art

Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts | HCMC, Vietnam

Huang Wen Hua 黃文華 was born in 1845 in Fujian province, China. He moved to Vietnam at the age of 18, following the 1860 Treaty of Peking, which allowed Chinese citizens to seek employment overseas. By the time he moved in 1863, Vietnam was freshly colonized by the French and consequently seen as full of business opportunities and relatively safe for Chinese immigrants.

The French privileged these Chinese immigrants over native Vietnamese within their corvee system; between 1870 and 1890 over 20,000 Chinese (mostly single men) moved to Cholon alone, creating the largest Chinatown in the world at that time. In just one generation, a merchant class of wealthy, pro-French, relatively unassimilated Sino-Vietnamese elites was created that held economic control of the south until reunification in 1975.

Huang first changed his name to the rather more Vietnamese Huỳnh Văn Hua, but soon realized it would behoove him to convert to Catholicism and use a French baptismal name. He finally ended as Jean-Baptiste Hui Bon Hoa; Hui Bon Hoa being not only an approximate transliteration of his name as pronounced in his native Hokkien dialect, but homophonous for the French “oui, bon Hoa”. His name taken as a whole, in English, reads: John the Baptist yes good Hoa (Hoa meaning people of Sino-Vietnamese descent).

He became the richest man in Saigon during his lifetime, but still visited China frequently, passing away there suddenly in 1901. He built his business from a single pawnshop opened in partnership with a former French employer to a property development empire; he was known to have owned 30,000 shophouses, as well as hotels, banks, hospitals, etc. His unrealized dream was to build the grandest villa in Saigon, a French style mansion large enough for all of his children and grandchildren to live together. In 1929, his three sons decided to start building the dream; before it was completed in 1934 two of them had also passed away.

Over time, successive generations were educated overseas and emigrated. These descendants still live in France and America today, using Hui-Bon-Hua as their surname. By 1967, the house was seized by the South Vietnamese government. All members of the Hui-Bon-Hua family left before the end of the Vietnam war, and in 1987 the three buildings were officially “donated” for use as an art museum, which opened in 1992.

The art here is solely Vietnamese. There are the requisite displays of Cham and Óc Eo artifacts, plus traditional Vietnamese styles like monumental lacquer paintings and paintings on silk. The most famous artists in Vietnam are shown here, as well as artists in the Vietnamese diaspora. I have zero knowledge of Vietnamese art or artists, and found the works of Lê Thị Kim Bạch, Trần Việt Sơn, Huỳnh Quốc Trọng, and Nguyễn Minh Quân compelling.

As in Hanoi there are umpteen war pictures, yet not a single one depicts an ARVN flag, despite this being the South. Money is too new in Vietnam for there to be any grand patrons of the arts just yet . . . if there are any Picassos or Chenghua porcelains in Vietnam, they are in private homes.

The museum doesn’t take more than a day to explore fully. I wish there was an onsite cafe, but I survived. I’d also advise against buying anything on nearby Antique Street, it’s all fake. If you want to buy an authentic work, there’s a selection of antique porcelain and some lithographs and watercolors in the museum’s ground floor gallery. They also have the best selection of books on Vietnamese art and artists that I’ve come across.

Hanoi Craft Villages | Vietnam

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According to Voice of Vietnam, within a two hours’ drive of Hanoi are 1350 craft villages, where families have passed down local artisanal skills for hundreds of years.

The most famous among them are:

  • Bát Tràng Pottery

  • Vạn Phúc Silk

  • Đông Hồ Woodcut Painting

  • Làng Vân Rice Wine

  • Non Nước Stone Carving

  • Ngũ Xã Bronze Casting

  • Phú Vinh Rattan and Bamboo Weaving

  • Đào Xá Traditional Musical Instruments

  • Quất Động Embroidery

  • Định Công Jewelry

  • Chuông Conical Hat

  • Chàng Sơn Carpentry & Fan

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As a lover of material culture, I very much wanted to visit at least a few. Based on my current shopping interests, I ended up choosing Đồng Kỵ wood carving, Hạ Thái lacquer, Chuyên Mỹ mother of pearl inlay, Quất Động embroidery, and Bát Tràng pottery.

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I paid a local tour guide $100 to drive me around to all five villages in one day. I do think it’s possible to do it on your own and have the same experience if you are comfortable on a motorbike; my tour guide had clearly not prepared anything special and we were more or less successfully walking in on craftspeople at work during the week. That said, if you plan on Grab taxi-ing it (like I would have otherwise done), even a sort of incompetent tour guide is more efficient, less stressful, costs the same, and you have someone to translate if you want to buy something.

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Speaking of shopping, I didn’t do any. I was fully prepared to spend hundreds on something special, but didn’t see anything. The villagers were mostly working to fill large, expensive, local, custom orders; what they had on offer at retail didn’t appeal. I’ve always noticed that Hanoi souvenir shops and galleries have heaps of the few same uninspiring wares. There seems to be no effort whatsoever to understand what tourists would buy. I wondered if the craft villages were really where these unremarkable things are made, and that seems to be the case.

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Once upon a time I owned a designer vintage shop, and recently I’ve been bitten by the retail bug again. The world has changed so much since I was in the game 15 years ago! Now, businesses can survive solely on social media. I’ve been toying with the idea of selling triple bottom line products I source as I travel.

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I believe there is potential in these villages to transform heritage savoir faire into modern luxury product, if I could find a local partner to handle communication and logistics. However, it would have to be built from absolute scratch; there is currently zero supply chain infrastructure in place. I also have zero capital, so it would be a slow and painful bootstrapping venture. Le sigh! I’ll get there eventually.

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TC Cannon: At the Edge of America

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TC Cannon was a Native American (Kiowa/Caddo/French) painter, poet, musician, and Vietnam vet. His Kiowa name was “he who stands in the sun”, he trained in the Southern Plains style of painting at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and he passed away in 1978 at the too young age of 31. During his lifetime his work was often interpreted as political and subversive; now it’s clearly so much more: earnest and insightful portraiture; aesthetically emblematic of its era; plaintive and relatable on a personal level. The feeling strongly impressed upon me by his work was patience.

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TC Cannon with his father in Vietnam

TC Cannon with his father in Vietnam

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If you’re interested in all the academic takes on TC Cannon, and want to hear his poetry read aloud, this is a great playlist

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I care deeply for the preservation of indigenous American peoples and their cultures. It has taken so long for mainstream perceptions of colonization to change from ‘a fight they lost and we won’ to . . . .the genocide it was. Going to the annual Bear Mountain powwow with my grandfather (who also snail-mailed me related anthropology and archaeology articles, yup, I’m old) helped me learn the difference between considering a cultural outgroup and consuming it. Decades later, as the cultural appropriation debate rages, I find myself reaching back for clarity in the distinction.

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This is a TC Cannon song ‘handed down’ in the family of one of his buddies

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I’ve never visited the Southwest or the Plains but hope to someday. In his work I see a lot of Gaugin, a very little Catlin. I’d love to see the settings.

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His sister still sells his work and manages his estate: http://www.tccannon.com/

Support the Native American Rights Fund: https://www.narf.org/

Go to the Powwow I went to as a little girl: https://www.crazycrow.com/site/event/bear-mountain-powwow/