22 aslife

HCMC

aslife

HCMC

24 aslife

HCMC

In a building at the end o a small street inBinh Thanh District, a crowd threatens tospill out onto the road on a Friday evening.Inside the white-washed exterior wall, themood is jovial and cans o beer are beingplucked rom a cooler and passed around.It is at rst dicult to reach the doorway andpierce the threshold o the ground foor. The scene is typical o a weekend at anew restaurant or a perormance by an in-ternational band at a local watering hole. Butthe crowd is gathered out o appreciation oranother o lie’s pleasures: art. The venue is the nonprot art space Sán Art, and the exhibit opening tonight is

Syntax + Diction,

a group show that eatures thework o seven local Vietnamese and VietKieu artists. One o those artists is Sán Artco-ounder Dinh Q. Le. In June, New York’sMuseum o Modern Art will premiere Le’svideo installation,

The Farmers and theHelicopters

(2006), the rst major installationby a Vietnamese artist ever purchased bythe MoMa.Given the turnout and Le’s celebrity inthe art world, it is perhaps dicult or thoserom countries with thriving contemporary artscenes to understand why spaces like Sán Art are constantly in peril o closing down.While contemporary art—not just art beingproduced

today,

but art that demonstratesan awareness o art history and advancesthe practice o art—has thrived in smallpockets o HCM City, a number o actorsto do with education, culture, politics andhistory have kept the inrastructure romgrowing, leaving it to a small group o indi-viduals and initiatives to keep contemporaryart practice afoat.

Ready for Contemporary Art?

To some, importing contemporary art prac-tices into Vietnam might at rst seem like aorm o cultural imperialism, but according toZoe Butt, who joined Sán Art as curator anddirector o programmes and developmentlast year, it was enquiries rom artists work-ing in Vietnam that brought her to HCM City.“The eedback I was getting rom artistswas there were no spaces in Saigon particu-larly or artists to experiment and to exhibitand have a dialogue about what contem-porary art is,” says Butt, “And there was noexperienced curator who understood how totalk about art and could help artists actuallynd themselves capable o talking to interna-tional art workers.”In any corner o the art world the role o the curator is integral, but or Vietnameseartists who are earnest about developingtheir practice, it is doubly important giventhe state o arts education. The curriculumin Vietnam still ocuses almost exclusivelyon traditional orms—drawing, sculpture,painting—and bypasses critical theory, theoundation o contemporary art practice. This is not lost on those who set the artsmanagement curriculum. In early 2008 whileshe was still based in Beijing, Butt wasinvited to speak to the Center or Develop-ment o Research o Culture. At the time,the Center was looking at China as a model,which had developed a lucrative tourist tradearound its thriving art scene. What was per-haps not apparent was exactly how dicultit would be to replicate that success.“One o the things about the supportor contemporary arts in Vietnam is there’sconusion as to what contemporary art is,”explains Butt.Much o Butt’s presentation ocused onthe ways in which art works are assignedvalue in developed art markets. Since collec-tors and auction houses largely ollow what’sbeing exhibited and purchased by publicspaces, she explained that it was necessaryto know how museum curators assess a

Tammy Nguyen

Born: San Francisco

Untitled Altar Box

, 2010black thread, silk

“One of thethings aboutthe support forcontemporaryarts in Viet-nam is there’sconfusion as towhat contem-porary art is”- Zoe Butt