The question of violence in Vietnamese contemporary art. Strategies of deconstruction and resistance.
Author: Labbez, Annie
Under the direction of: Evelyne Toussaint
Toulouse 2 University
Texte français
Keywords: Vietnamese contemporary art,memory and history,decolonial,Installations,commoning,cosmopolitism.
Abstract :
The thesis develops a cartography of violence through recent works by contemporary Vietnamese artists, the works studied were produced in the last two decades and for the most part in the years 2010-2020. By violence, we must understand that of the colonial imposition of the metropolis, the placing of Indochina under trusteeship by Japan and the tragic famine that followed, that of the « American war » in parallel with a fratricidal war, the violence of exile and the painful experience of returning to the native land.
The past violence that the Vietnamese seek to conceal is now replaced by that of a present charged with dependence and submission. The word violence is applied to extremely diverse situations, massacres, atrocities, but there is more subdued violence, that of economic domination and the great East-West partition as well as that of a repressive and authoritarian Party.
In addition, on the one hand, there is a cultural violence due to the replacement from around 1918 of chu nôm by quoc ngu, which became the official language. This phenomenon of disappearance has evolved to such an extent that today, less than a hundred specialists are able to read chu nôm fluently, which means that 80 million Vietnamese speakers do not have access to their written history. On the other hand, today, globalization is accelerating the standardization of knowledge and culture, which also represents a real challenge for the artists.
We will see how the artists succeed in taming their history as well as the colonial question by going beyond it and, without complacency, mixing other mythologies that have spanned crossed the 20th century, japanese fascism, communism, maoism, nazism, capitalism. Allusive thought and coded expression are the attributes of these works with critical intent. Conveying hidden messages, they perhaps refer to certain Western artists but assert their autonomy. Offering many levels of reading, avoiding the literal, do they succeed in speaking universally ?
