Contemporary

It is a collage of artwork depicting Vietnamese women in many different roles and art styles. The background is a pattern found on Đông Sơn drums, depicting scenes of people, animals, and daily life activities. — The leftmost image in our banner is Thiếu nữ bên hoa huệ by Tô Ngọc Vân. The painting is of a Vietnamese girl next to a lily was created by artist Tô Ngọc Vân in 1943. It is considered his most famous work and most representative of 20th century Vietnamese Fine arts. The painting depicts a portrait of a young woman wearing áo dài, a traditional Vietnamese dress, next to a vase of white lilies. Tilting her head down to smell the flowers, the colors of the shirt and flowers blend together to depict lingering sadness and gentleness. From 1935 to 1939, Tô Ngọc Vân taught at Phnom Penh High School, then teaching at Indochina Fine Arts College until 1945. After the August Revolution, Tô Ngọc Vân participated in the resistance war against the French. In 1950, he was in charge of the Viet Bac Fine Arts School. The artist is considered to be the first person to have merit in using oil paints in Vietnam. Cầu Kiều have chosen to replace the lilies with the hammer and sickle, a symbol that represents proletarian solidarity – a union between the peasantry and the working class. It was first adopted during the Russian Revolution; the hammer represents industrial workers and the sickle represents farmers as the workers that make up the foundation of our society. It now represents international proletariat international solidarity and has been adopted by many socialist nations such as Vietnam, China and Cuba.

Cầu Kiều Collective’s banner

It’s important to recognize that colonialism is not always manifested as overt violence. It can also be enforced subtlety through the very design of our cities. In Vietnam, we can see how French colonialist urban planners transformed the built environments of cities like Hanoi and HCMC/Saigon to support their colonization and oppression of Vietnamese people.

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