Hanoi Bohemia, Glenn Belverio [best short books to read txt] 📗

Anh Khanh, the Vietnamese painter, sculptor, performance artist and singer, is squeezing a tree branch shaped like a penis. “Look! Look how sexy nature is!” he exclaims gleefully. “Why can’t we be as sexy as this?” Nearby, a huge stone vagina, sculpted by Khanh, stands by the road that leads up to the artist’s compound on the Gia Lam side of Hanoi’s Red River. Dozens of towering phallic totems and vaginal idols are scattered around Khanh’s property, along with some large, plastic humanoid figures suspended from trees in his lush garden. Under his wooden stilt house, which he bought and had shipped from the countryside to Gia Lam, is a ground floor studio where he exhibits his paintings. Upstairs in the dimly lit, cavernous house, my friend Tomoko and I lie on mats on the floor, gazing up at the bamboo leaf-thatched roof and around at the array of Buddhist statues and altars. The humid air is thick with the smell of incense. A CD of experimental music composed by the painter Nguyen Van Cuong with vocals by Khanh is playing and I begin to slip into a waking dream state . . .

Khanh, who is an extremely youthful 43, has lived in Hanoi his whole life and has been making art since 1990. With his long hair and clothing that he makes himself--today he is wearing a black shirt that exposes a rectangular section of flesh, from neck to naval, on his slender torso--he is considered the most eccentric person in conservative Hanoi. But this has not always been so. After attending art school from age nine to fourteen, Khanh’s father sent him to the police university when he was eighteen and there he was trained to work for the Communist Party Secret Police. “My job was watching artists and their work, because the politics of Vietnam were that you followed the rules of the Party," he explains of the undercover job he performed for thirteen years. “There was nothing dangerous going on with the artists. I didn’t know what to report to my bosses because everything was good but they wanted to hear something bad.” During his training, he was sent to the Hanoi Industrial Arts College where his love for the arts intensified. “When I finished art school in 1990, I had my first exhibition, a show of nude paintings. The Minister of Police came to the show and demanded to know what the paintings were. I explained they were ‘surrealist’ and he said ‘Poland lost their country because of art like this.’ After that I quit the Party and the police and they didn’t bother me because my father was a big guy in the police force.”

Every year during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, Khanh stages fantastical happenings on his compound and hundreds, sometimes thousands of Hanoians flock there to be a part of it. The performances are primal and ritualistic, with nearly naked participants sporting body paint, dancing and gyrating through surreal landscapes built by Khanh. One year, he leapt from a burning boat that was perched in a tall tree and hung suspended from the tree’s branches. Another year he painted the cows that graze on his land with bright colors and erected a series of bamboo and cloth structures. The police came the next day and tore them down. And during a performance on the banks of Hoan Kiem Lake, he was arrested as he performed a series of minimalist dance moves to an ambient soundtrack inside a red cloth circle. “A lot of artists are still scared of the government but I’m happy to be living and working in Hanoi," he tells me.

“Hanoi has always been the center of culture in Vietnam," says Suzanne Lecht, an American who has been running the beautiful Art Vietnam gallery in Hanoi since 1994. “The north has always been a place for poets and writers, the arts really flourish here. In the 1930’s, for example, Hanoi emulated Parisian café society as Vietnamese artists gathered and discussed their work.” In 1993, Lecht lived in China but was inspired to move to Vietnam by a photo she saw in a magazine article about Saigon. “It was of two old men with long beards, wearing pajamas and sipping tea with ancient molding on a wall behind them . . . the photo really captured the beauty and sadness of Vietnam. I was very affected by it.” She then saw some work done by a group of artists called the “Gang of Five” who studied at Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine, an art university founded by the French in 1925, and decided to set up her own gallery in Hanoi. (The Ecole des Beaux-Arts is the only fine arts academy founded by a colonial power in Southeast Asia. It is now known as the Hanoi Fine Arts College.)

The day after our visit to his Gia Lam compound, Khanh takes us to visit Le Quang Ha, 41, a Hanoi-born artist whose work is exhibited at Art Vietnam. A heavy downpour has left the alleyway leading to the entrance of Ha’s home flooded, so Ha ferries us one by one on the back of his motorcycle through the deep water. Inside his three-floor home, I am confronted by three large oil-painted panels of three enormously fat and hideously monstrous women wearing nothing but red pumps, sitting on toilets. When I inquire about the style of the work, Ha quips that it’s “Socialist Realism” and it doesn’t take me long to figure out what a droll sense of humor he has. Socialist Realism is, of course, the very literal school of sentimental, propagandistic painting that was favored under Ho Chi Minh’s government, which took heavy cues from Maoist and Soviet art and can still be seen on billboards around Hanoi. But Ha insists that his peculiar take on “Socialist Realism” is a commentary on the excesses of capitalism. “It’s about people who eat and eat until they are sick," he explains.

Ha is on the verge of becoming a huge art star, with a buzz so loud it’s reached the curators of the prestigious Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan who recently purchased one of his large canvases for an even larger sum. I ask Ha a few more questions about his work, but his attention span dwindles and he quickly settles down with Khanh for a discussion about the various women the two of them have bedded recently. “I love women, I love sex," he tells me and I want to believe him, despite the gloomy depictions of the act represented in some of his paintings. Men and women are sometimes awkwardly hidden under white sheets as they perform acts of copulation and fellatio. In one such painting, the recipient of a blowjob is late US president Lyndon Johnson, wrapped in American flags and moaning ecstatically as the Vietnam War rages around him. Elements of surrealism run through much of Ha’s work. Against the wall of his upstairs studio stands a robot built from discarded radios, word processors, typewriters and various scraps of metal. “Humans are like robots now," he tells me. In Vietnam? “Everywhere.”

While Ha’s paintings are often dark and nightmarish, a lot of the work that Lecht shows in her gallery is meditative and influenced by Vietnamese spirituality. Le Quoc Viet’s woodblock prints draw heavily on Buddhist imagery, which is no surprise since the artist grew up living with monks in a pagoda. “The Vietnamese have been at war for thousands of years, so they are tired of politics and want to dream of something else," explains Lecht. “They are concerned with other human problems, like lack of spirituality and the race for money.”

Another Hanoi-based artist who Lecht shows is the 25-year-old painter Nguyen Manh Hung, who makes his paintings in a stilt house where Buddhist statues are produced. Hung’s work is obsessed with the relationship between Vietnam’s agricultural, historical and urban aspects. One painting depicts North Vietnamese Army warplanes toting farm wagons filled with hay through the air. “My father was a pilot during the American War," Hung tells me. “Vietnam has a lot of agriculture and that is what we are best at. We need to use modern industry to work for our agriculture.” Another painting depicts an AK-47 rifle hanging from a post, its barrel transformed into a loud speaker, “because language is a weapon” Hung explains. This was one of the images that were censored by the Vietnamese Communist Party when it appeared with a recent profile on Hung in the Hong Kong-based Asian Art News

. Another image, which has been blacked-out by hand with magic marker by censors, is of a painting of a large man standing next to a toy-sized truck. Perhaps the painting made old-school Party cadres nervous because the depiction of a larger-than-life ‘worker’--big enough to squash a truck--was tantamount to an uprising. Vehicles are a major theme in Hung’s work. In a painting from his car and truck series, an old Soviet-era car has its hood up revealing a motor built from human organs as doctors are gathered around, performing an operation. “Cars and trucks are a way for me to tell the human story.”

A few nights later, Tomoko and I meet Le Quang Ha for a dinner of batter-fried tofu, beef wrapped in betel-nut leaves, thien ly flower soup and Ha Noi brand beer. We then head over to Chim Sáo, a café where Hanoian artists meet to drink and socialize, in the Hai Ba Trung district. Upstairs, where a group of artists is sitting on floor cushions and drinking beer, we are introduced to a Frenchman named Jean-Marc Rouget who has recently moved to Hanoi from Paris with his family to create multi-media installations and performances. Anh Khanh arrives wearing a white version of the outfit he had on a few days ago, with his latest girlfriend in tow: a leggy Brown graduate from Texas who has come to Hanoi to study and translate Vietnamese poetry. We all double up on motorcycles and ride over to Apocalypse Now, the infamous dance club that draws a mix of people, from Vietnamese hookers to thrill-seeking expats, who all seem to be looking for trouble.

Stifled by the club’s heat, we decide to leave and head for the more low-key Phúc Tân Bar located on the banks of the Red River. In front of the bar, a tattooed teen is reclining on his motorcycle while a gang of youths begin bouncing up and down on the back of our taxi as I fumble for the right amount of dong to pay the driver. Inside, a portrait of Che Guevara hangs over the bar and ‘80s American punk blares from the jukebox. As we take in the view of motorcycle headlights floating ghost-like over the darkened Long Bien Bridge in the open-air patio, I ask Khanh how he and his new squeeze met. “At the love market," he grins broadly. “North of Hanoi, in Sapa.” 24-hour outdoor markets selling food and an array of goods are common in Asia, but the Sapa market has earned its nickname because of the singles wandering the stalls looking for more than fried spring rolls or bargain electronics. When the bar’s jukebox flips over from “I’m Against It” by the Ramones (“I don’t like the Viet Cong/I don’t like Burger King/I don’t like anything/ I’m against it”) to “Turn the Beat Around," Khanh’s girlfriend drags him out onto the rickety dance floor. They begin swaying and gyrating like slender, white, birch tree branches in a windstorm--not quite as sexy as real nature, but close enough.

Glenn Belverio 2004