In the dawn of feminism in Vietnam, the poet Ho Xuan Huong was the first woman to raise her voice on gender issues and Confucian patriarchy through her works in the late 18th century.
“Chém cha cái kiếp lấy chồng chung.
Kẻ đắp chăn bông kẻ lạnh lùng,
Năm thì mười hoạ chăng hay chớ
Một tháng đôi lần có cũng không.
Cố đấm ăn xôi, xôi lại hẩm,
Cầm bằng làm mướn, mướn không công.
Thân này ví biết dường này nhỉ
Thà trước thôi đành ở vậy xong.”
Since then, the Vietnamese feminism movement has come a long way toward gender equality. Some positive data showed the progress such as the literacy rate of adult female at 96,3% 1 in 2018, and the proportion of female academics went up from 42.5 to 48.5 2 between 2006 and 2018. And of course, no more sharing husband marriages. However, is it safe already to say there is nothing left to do with feminism in the 21st century?
We might gain gender equality in Law, but not in reality due to the deep-rooted Confucian patriarchal values in Vietnamese society. Gender issues still exist in contemporary Vietnam. Through the lens of art, these artists will show you their sense of self and beliefs around gendered behaviours, female role models, and social pressure that still heavily placed on us, especially women.
Table of Contents
Le Hien Minh
Le Hien Minh is a contemporary sculptor employing a traditional Vietnamese handmade paper called Dó. Her art is committed to Vietnamese cultural sustainability, which led her to broaden topics from personal experiences to social issues such as gender roles, societal hierarchies, and female identity since 2014.
In 2016, she exhibited Ball (resvisted) inspired by a Vietnamese custom, homemade medicinal wine for male sexual health. A glass bottle was presented on an ancestral altar and filled over by Dó-paper balls. In front of the installation, there was a line styled in poster letters:
“Nhiệm vụ lớn nhất của phụ nữ là sinh ra một đứa con trai.”
The woman’s greatest duty is to produce a son.
Ball (revisited), 2016. Image by Le Hien Minh
With this artwork, Minh questioned the gender roles in Vietnamese society deeply influenced by Confucian values: is bearing children really the greatest value of women?
In the following years of art practicing, she was inspired by Đạo Mẫu, the Worship of Vietnamese Mother Goddesses, and employed it in her large scale Dó-paper sculpture.
In 2021, her installation titled Gods of Expectation was exhibited in Vietnam for the first time. In the Factory Art Contemporary gallery space, the warm yellow light perfectly harmonized with the brown colour of Dó-paper.
The Gods of expectation, 2021. Image by Le Hien Minh
The installation included three sculptures: one combining a goddess statue named Divine Cycle and a washing machine; one displaying a goddess statue called Divine Source in the laying down pose (traditionally seen in male Buddha statues only) on the bed; and one featuring a goddess statue named Divine Constant sitting on a kitchen sink designed like an altar table. Three sculptures were connected by wires, a facsimile of umbilical cords.
The installation spoke up the social expectations placed on women’s roles in taking care of housework and children. The notion of “Men building a house, women making a home” is the 21st-century version of the Confucian idea “At home, you follow your father – Married, you follow your husband – Husband dead, you follow your son.” In all versions, this idea devalues women and limits women’s potential to the supporting role.
“By combining symbols of female powers with symbols of female duty,” she shared in her talk show with The Factory Contemporary Arts Center, “it’s my intention to create a new kind of object which challenges our collected understanding of femininity.”
On the wall of the installation, she asked all of us, both male and female, five questions:
“Who is woman?
What is woman?
Where is woman?
When is woman?
Why is woman?”
Each of us with various cultures and life experiences might relate to her art or not, but all of us need to rethink women’s actual values and have our answer about women’s identity.
Ly Hoang Ly
Unlike Le Hien Minh, Ly Hoang Ly, a poet and visual artist, doesn’t commit to specific mediums but continuously examines performance art, public art, and poetry performance. Received Fulbright Scholarship for an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and widely exhibited in over five countries, she has not been concerned about gender inequality. “Women artists from the 1980s have been freed from the pressures and expectations placed upon previous generations,” she shared in the e-mail with Cristina Nualart, “and young artists have equal opportunities to male artists.” 3
However, being a woman is still a matter to her, contributing to her life materials transformed into the installation & performance art in 2000: Monument of Round trays. Talking about the installation first, it is a cone-shaped monument of 400 round aluminum trays that can interact with the surrounding environment, such as sky, wind, and people. Why trays? Almost every Vietnamese household uses a round tray to contain their meals in Vietnam, cooked mainly by women. The trays represent women’s duty to nurture the family, tagged with the common belief that women’s place was fundamentally in the kitchen.
Monument of Round trays, 2010. Image by Ly Hoang Ly
Her intention behind the tray monument was to show the monotony of domestic routine. Vietnamese women have been drowned in house chores that eventually become their female identity, which led to her art performance. In front of audiences of all genders of all ages in the year 2000, she covered herself with round trays, wobbly stumbling around the monument and making deafening noises. After walking restlessly, she looked tired of the tray cover, throwing chopsticks all over her head, and starting struggling to escape from it. After freeing herself out of the heavy cover, she angrily threw chopsticks and hitched the tray monument. Finally, the performance ended with the scene where she was frustrated sitting inside the monument. All the sounds, the light, movement, and emotion were driven to the climate that put the viewers in a dialogue about women’s wants and desires.
You can view her art performance here.
Nguyen Thi Chau Giang
Nguyen Thi Chau Giang, an established and important artist in contemporary Vietnamese art, has approached feminism with sensitive eyes, torn inner sides, and romantic narratives. Formerly a writer, Giang prefers observing and contemplating to talking. That’s why when it comes to painting, she hides her female subjects’ untold stories in their eyes and movements of their lips. These stories are about the inner contraction of a person, especially a woman in modern society, being torn between their happiness and others, between their career and their family, and between social beliefs and their female identity.
With that much contradiction observed from surroundings resonant with her torn inner, Giang chooses Vietnamese silk painting, a soft and elegant medium requiring a high level of calmness and care, to paint the problems of the time. In the series Inside of Me (2018) exhibited at Vin Gallery, Giang combined the blue and red Asian dragon image with female characters to create a new Vietnamese female identity: dragon-women. Asian dragons symbolize power, while they are referred to as wicked creatures in Western culture. Hence, they are seemingly a perfect metaphor to represent one’s internal conflicts. Also, by employing the dragon image, Giang wanted to embrace women whose deep-inside power can be released to overcome all adversities and challenges for the sake of their families. These women who can be your mother, your grandmother, your sister, or your wife constrain both their strength and contradictions but still choose to sacrifice themselves for the wellbeing of their kin.
Female characters in Giang’s painting are among rare nude ladies not painted by a male artist in Vietnamese art. By creating a dragon-women image, Giang aspires that women can not only accept their inner strength and conflicts, but also their feminine beauty, which means to accept to be a woman. As shared in the conversation with Art Republik, she was highly emotional when reading a comment like this from a woman audience: “It’s so blessed to have a female body. An old woman who during her teenage years and youth always dreamed of becoming a man, has now found a mistake.” 4
Himiko Nguyen
2011 saw a controversial phenomenon called “being nude for the environment” in which a Vietnamese model took her nude photos to call for environment protection. With a sense of humour and sarcasm, Himiko Nguyen, a Vietnamese visual artist, has produced artwork titled Come Out I (2011), or “being nude for myself” as she joked, where her naked self-portrait photographs were encased in black boxes with a hole as a lens for viewers to look in. To explain her intention for performing art in black boxes, she answers in an interview with Post Vidai Collection (2018) 5 that she did not want to force audiences to watch her nudity with pictures hung on the wall, adapting to the censorship culture in Vietnam. They had a choice to view the art or not, but only with her requirement to take photos of them looking in the hole. Some people agreed, some did not. She was fine with all.
Come Out. Image by Postvidai
From her personal experiences, Himiko acknowledged that most Vietnamese women refer to sex when it comes to nudity. She is also uncomfortable when men watch nude women and comment on their appearance. Her Come Out I first aimed to embrace her self-identity as a woman and a lesbian, then to change the Vietnamese women’s perception about their body curves.
Come Out II. Image by Himiko Nguyen
Continuing with Come Out I, Come Out II (2018 and going on) was exhibited at Himiko’s visual space in Ho Chi Minh city. Once again, nude photographs were boxed and viewed through a hole. Viewers can adjust the light in the box with a button like a radio tuner. However, this time models are Himiko and various people, including different nationalities, genders, and sexual orientations. She took their poses, collected their slices of life, and told a wholesome story hidden in black boxes like a treasure for people who wanted to seek out. With the Come Out project that she interpreted as “Inside or outside of the light,” she tried to blur the gender lines, encouraging people to liberate themselves from cultural obstacles and enjoy their beauty as primary human beings without being labeled.
Himiko means “a child who sees the fire” in Japanese. In practicing art, Himiko wishes herself to “see a fire.” Perhaps, her fire in art also shed light on someone’s identity in the Come Out project.
Le Hoang Bich Phuong
Le Hoang Bich Phuong is an 8X visual artist based in Ho Chi Minh and Portland, much younger than the above seniors but a well-known emerging artist in Vietnam. During her art practice, she has merged Vietnamese silk painting techniques with Japanese woodblock prints tradition and myths and fairy tales of Vietnam 6 and the world to create her own unique personal style.
Crimson scarlet (2016) A transformative disguise (2012)
Images by Le Hoang Bich Phuong
If there are three words to describe Phuong’s silk painting style, they should be dreamy, playful, and eccentric. Her animal-human images bring both softness and phobia to viewers simultaneously, reminding us of characters in Animal Farm (George Orwell). The way she invents the infantile vibe for her characters seems to be a coping mechanism that protects them (and her) from adulthood burdened with expectations placed on women and humans. Her concerns conveyed through art are diverse from a self-identity, cultural and political ideologies, and life and death. In short, she is concerned about being a human, not only a woman.
“Speaking of feminism and masculinity”, Phuong said in the e-mail message to Cristina Nualart, “I think it is an endless war and I think that each generation of women should have the freedom to explore and explore themselves and their interests as human being”.
Conclusion
These artists might not define themselves as feminist artists, like Georgia O’Keeffe, one of the best-known women painters who always resisted the label ‘woman artist.’ Still, they have engaged with feminist ideas to define their identity without being tagged.
Feminism is not a war between women and men but a war with social dogmas to achieve the freedom to live a fulfilled life for each human being. The achievement of feminism might come the day that there is no more labeled gender in living one’s mind and social ideology.
Until that day, we can expect to see more female artists paved the way by these above artists, either carrying an overt feminist agenda or not, in contemporary Vietnamese art.
Footnotes:
(1) Vietnam | World Bank Development Indicators
(2) Higher Education Sector Report, The World Bank, p.30,
(3) Christina Nualart, “Contemporary Feminist Art in Vietnam: The visual emergence of agency”, 2018, 27.
(4) Nguyen Thi Chau Giang, conversation with Art Republik magazine 2, 103.
(5) Interview with Vietnamese Artist Himiko Nguyen (2018)
(6) Thanh Huong, “Le Hoang Bich Phuong: from surreality to reality” (2017), Tienphong.vn
(7) Lê Hoàng Bích Phượng, e-mail message to Cristina Nualart, “Contemporary Feminist Art in Vietnam: The visual emergence of agency“, 2018, 36.
More source:
- Le Hien Minh’s website
- Artist talk with Le Hien Minh
- Ly Hoang Ly’s website
- Nguyen Thi Chau Giang at Vin Gallery
- Himiko Nguyen, Come Out II (2018)
- Le Hoang Bich Phuong’s website