Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam

“Vietnamese contemporary art is vibrant, amazingly beautiful and honest. It’s a wonderful balance of East and West.”

– Naja Pham Lockwood, trustee, Asian Art Museum

“The feeling of the art comes alive with every piece.”

– Melinda Alisa Sykes, The Sentinel

Contemporary Vietnamese women artists challenged the traditional role of women in Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam, a collection of approximately 50 recent works from 10 artists that toured 10 venues. Curated by Nora Annesley Taylor, a research associate with the Smithsonian Institution and associate professor at Arizona State University, the exhibition featured drawing, painting, photography, performance, sculpture, and video.

Today’s Vietnam—a diverse patchwork of 54 separate ethnic groups—is home to a wide-ranging art that brings together a dazzling array of cultural and historical (and sometimes paradoxical) influences and significances. Dinh Thi Tham Poong, who grew up near the Chinese border, creates sumptuous watercolors of woodland scenes on handcrafted paper derived from mulberry bark; Phuong M. Do, raised in Laos and educated in the United States as a Fulbright scholar, documents the émigré experience of deracination and loneliness in a striking series of photographic self-portraits on the streets of Vietnam; and Nguyen Bach Dan interlaces Chinese and American influences in her haunting ink landscapes of bristling forests, thickets and groves, at once traditional and surreal. Using a range of subject matters and aesthetic sensibilities, these and other artists explore gender and cultural identity, and offer a diversified view of Vietnam. They also examine ways to provide alternative representations of the female body and gender roles in their society.

Changing Identity was organized by International Arts & Artists and was supported in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation.

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