Can artists be successful in creating systems for contemporary art production and interpretation?
Late last year, one of Vietnam’s pioneering artists, Vu Dan Tan, passed away at the age of 63. He was a wiry, grey bearded man who loved the feel of paper and performance. Known for his vigorous body acts with paint, Vu was a man who had traced the journey from Vietnam to Cuba by train and boat in 1973, stopping in Beijing and Russia – his feet never touching capitalist ground. From 1987-1990, Vu lived in Moscow, where he was exposed to the artistic freedoms enabled under Russia’s Perestroika (political and economic reforms). His memory was vivid of how much these journeys had compelled him to examine the notion of independent thinking in Communist Vietnam – thus he started Salon Natasha in 1990, Vietnam’s first independent art space, where he encouraged artists in Hanoi to gather, chat and exhibit their work. It is this idea of arrival and departure; of fleeing and returning, of choosing and creating that I shall focus on in this DISPATCH. It is a sensitive topic in Vietnam, tempered
