Tuan Andrew Nguyen, in collaboration with Tuan Andrew Nguyen, in collaboration with

Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Linkfish, Ca Sau Yellow, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, Wowy, Seller, Sorry,
Gil, Ngo Dong, and Jason Huang, Proposal Ngo Dong, and Jason Huang, Proposal for a
for a Vietnamese Landscape #2: Independence Vietnamese Landscape #4: Wowy New Pop
end Freedom, Gil, Your Hair Back into Place, Resistance, 2007, oil on canvas, 47/i x 70% in.
2 0 0 6 , oil on canvas. 47/4 x70'/8 in. ( l 2 0 x 180 cm) ( 120 X 180 cm) (artwork © Tuan Andrew Nguyen)
(artwork © Tuan Andrew Nguyen)
 What if the Vietnam War left behind baseball as one of its legacies? What if a
Vietnamese rapper froin Saigon cotild dialogue with the New York-based rapper
named Saigon?' What if propaganda, commercial advertising, and graffiti cotild
be aligned in an aesthetic and sensory pattern, charmingly woven together to
shape a Utopian urban fabric in Vietnam's major cities? Each of the works of Tuan
Andrew Nguyen (born 1976) has embodied a proposal for an imaginary scenario,
a fictional narrative that turns on a convergence of symbols or stories
Pamela N. Corey drawn from sociocultural paradigms that seem diametrically opposed.
These stories are rooted in the material backdrop of present-day
Crafted Signs of urban Vietnam, and their artistic renderings make more direct those
moments in Vietnamese history when particular ideological systems
Obsolescence: have come into conflict.
The initial platform for these questions was a series of paintings
Tu an Andrew Nguyen's titled Proposal for a Vietnamese Cityscape (200J-6), which, when visually
deconstructed, invoke numerous questions about the palimpsestic
Aesthetic Artifacts nature of cities, and in partictilar the historical and dialectical notions
of modernity that continue to resonate in everyday life in contempo-
rary Vietnam. The paintings are compositions of visual signs referencing compet-
ing aesthetic and ideological programs currently interwoven into the landscape of
major Vietnamese cities. They result from collaborations among three generations
and three types of artists. Tuan, a Vietnamese-American multimedia artist based
in Ho Chi Minh City, ultimately commissioned and composed the paintings as
sardonic imaginary visions of a socialist and capitalist urban utopia.^ The images
of graffiti were painted by Vietnamese graffiti artists in a studio space, then pho-
tographed and digitally inserted into photographs of streets and public spaces in
1. The city of Saigon served as the capital of south Ho Chi Minh City. Finally, the digitally composed photographs were rendered
Vietnam beginning in the French colonial period,
and was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1975 after in oil paint by Ngo Dong, a former Vietnam People's Army artist from the north,
the Communist takeover and unification of north who altered the final cityscape into the painterly style espoused by the French-
and south 'Vietnam. IHowever, it remains "Saigon"
for most of its residents.
trained Vietnamese artists of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts d'Indochine from the colo-
2. Throughout this article the artist will be nial period.'
referred to by his first name, as is the standard
convention with Vietnamese names.
What results from these insertions, translations, and superimpositions are
3. Following the Beaux-Arts model, the French painted cityscapes that capture a dialogue occtn-ring on the surfaces of public
colonial administration established a university spaces in large Vietnamese cities like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, in which
program to train artists, as opposed to artisans,
in Hanoi in 1926. signage, graffiti, advertising, state propaganda, and tourist images both compete
4. Tuan quoted in Gridithya Gaweewong, "Tuan with and complement one another in their visual language. One of Tuan's main
Andrew Nguyen: Proposals for a Vietnamese
Landscape," in The Fifth Asia-Padfic Triennial of concerns with the series was to explore "how signage, both propaganda and
Contemporary Art, ed. Lynne Seear and Suhanya advertising, resemble each other in such remarkable and uncanny ways."* The
Raffel, exh. cat. (South Brisbane, Queensland:
Queensland Art Gallery, 2006), 158. different forms of signage contend with each other as alternate signifiers of mod-
j . The entrance of modernity in Vietnam is a ernization, and of the state ideologies and economic systems that have in turn
disputed topic. Many are in consensus that with
colonialism came a form of Westernized moder-
attempted to animate and orient these forms of modernity. '• Tuan has aligned
nity along with processes of modernization, but these embodied histories into a representational space that allows for the reading
much official rhetoric is based on the notion that of alternate and overlapping notions of modernity and progress, as they are mate-
true modernity arrived with the socialist unifica-
tion of the country, which forced the south of rially imprinted in the urban landscape and in the city dweller's daily perceptual
Vietnam out of a state of neo-colonial subservi- field. If Walter Benjamin's conception of historical materialism approached his-
ence. Others believe that real modernity was only
achieved with the 1986 economic reforms known torical processes through the representational value of their images, and not their
as Doi Moi ("New Change"), which opened the narratives, Tuan's paintings aimed to reveal the nature of contemporary Vietnamese
formally centralized economy to foreign invest-
ment, privatization, and more contemporary "urban phantasmagoria," where the aestheticized politics and commodities are
globalizing processes. equally intrinsic to an urban visual culture in which representational value comes

47 artjournal
 to the fore and associated narratives or significations only retain superfluous
6. See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of
meaning.' Such a portrait of failed Utopian promises contains a particularly strik-
Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project ing message in the contemporary Vietnamese social climate, in which neoliberal
(Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1989), 82-83.
governance aims to reconcile a globalizing Vietnamese consvimer culture with a
7. This reading would stress Tuan's cityscapes as
imagined because of the way that he has created society perceived to be in the process of becoming unmoored from moral foun-
a singular vision of a universal Vietnamese city; his dations rooted in Confucianism and a contentious socialist history.
vision borrows and synthesizes key visual markers
from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, two cities that In addition, the collective nature of the paintings' production and the
have endured a contentious cultural and political method of assembling their compositions reflect the notion of the city as
relationship throughout history. The issue of a
universal portrait of the Vietnamese city leads one palimpsest, possessing diverse layers beneath the surface, aspects of which have
to question how conceptual models or images of been erased and reinscribed.' In this series of paintings, md in later projects,
the Asian city, the African city, and even the global
city have been represented. Tuan was aiming to portray the difficulty of categorizing late-socialist or postso-
8. Hou Hanru and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, eds., Cities cialist Asian societies, whose ambivalent visual landscapes are indicative of their
on the Move (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Gerd
hybrid and paradoxical sociopolitical character. As Hou Hanru has described, "A
Hatje, 1997), n.p.
9. The campaigns are a long-standing tradition, kind of mixture of liberal Capitalist market economy and Asian, post-totalitarian
dating to the 1940s, under HoChi Minh's "new social control is being established as a new social order. Culture, in such a con-
way of life" initiative (Nep Song Moi) to modern-
ize social life and behavior. See Lisa Drummond, text, is by nature hybrid, impinre and contradictory."^
"Street Spaces: Practices of Public and Private The key focus of each painting was the working-out of a dialogical and
Space in Urban Vietnam," Urban Studies 37 (2000):
2377-91. esp. 2385. spatial relationship between the diflerent forms of signage that dominate the
10. Initiatives and state projects that employ visual contemporary Vietnamese cityscape. Government propaganda posters have long
campaigns in public spaces recall Néstor García
Canclini's description of the Mexican govern-
served as a primary instrument of the government's social mobilization cam-
ment's role as a principal actor in national and paigns, often targeted at families, women, and youth, and are highly visible
urban life, whose development of national patri-
mony was founded on imagery of visual culture
throughout public spaces in large cities and in popular culture and media.''Today,
rather than print because of high rates of illiteracy. these "mobilization posters" (trarJi co dong) continue to demonstrate one facet of
See Garcia Canclini, "From National Capital to
the state's larger project of civilizing the city, by infusing public spaces with mes-
Global Capital: Urban Change in Mexico City,"
trans. Paul Liffman, Public Culture 12 (2000): sages aiming to ingrain a sense of communal civic responsibility in the name of
207—13, esp. 208. society-building.'" However, in the current "signscapes" of postcolonial and late-
11. See Roland Barthes, "Semiology and the
Urban." in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader
socialist cities undergoing accelerated neoliberal processes of global integration,
in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: such posters can only gesture toward the gro-wing obsolescence of their original
Routledge, 1997), 166-72. Ales Erjavec comments
on this separation in the context of the transition
political meanings and functions, especially in light of their new status as popular
to late socialiam and postsocialism. noting that commodities, as they are in high demand among tourists and collectors who
in many countries—such as Cuba, China, and value their aesthetic qualities and memorabilia status. They thus illustrate, in a
Yugoslavia—as more people became aware of
the growing dismantling of ruling ideologies, "the way, what Roland Barthes described as "empty signifieds," signifiers that gradually
link between the ideological signifier and the social become devoid of the actual significations for which they are intended."
referent was irreparably destroyed, and . . . the
gap between the two was becoming an abyss." The propaganda poster in Proposal for a Vietnamese Landscape #2 commemorates
Erjavec goes on to suggest that this irretrievable Saigon's liberation (or, for many overseas Vietnamese, its "fall") by Communist
disconnect has served to support the argument
that socialist countries had—in a way—entered troops on April 30, 1975, and its unification with the north, with the text reading
the "hyperreal" condition of postmodernity "There is nothing more precious than independence and freedom" (Kliong co gi
prior to their Western capitalist counterparts,
and that "the period of postsocialism was an quy hon tu lap tu do). In ironic contrast to the poster's optimistic message of prog-
era of social and political cynicism in which irony ress, however, the peasant in front of it blocks part of the text. The dove looks
was the dominant trope." Erjavec, introduction
t o Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition:
forward toward the shampoo advertisement, toward a future in which the ideals
Politicized Art under Late Socialism, ed. Erjavec and of the revolution have had to compromise with capitalist economic systems,
Boris Groys (Berkeley: University of California
Press. 2003), 4. In the post-reform, late-socialist
while the girl in the ad turns to the past, toward the socialist poster, only to look
context of Tuan's Proposal for a Vietnamese over her shoulder at the present-day onlooker. While the dove in the propaganda
Landscape paintings, it could be argued that the
poster looks forward to the future, its wings extended in a dynamic composition
works engage (albeit in a more subdued way) in
this distinctive quality of ironic critique that recir- suggesting vitality, enthusiasm, and motion, the peasant or rural migrant stands
culates socialist visual iconography, characteristic idly, looking do-wn the street, as though awaiting something or someone yet to
of earlier waves of contemporary art practice in
postsocialist nations, for example, 1990s political arrive. The incorporation of the graffiti, which further draws the two forms of
pop in China. -visual signage into a spatial dialogue, refiects Tuan's own personal interest in graf-

48 FALL 2 0 1 2
 "NGIÖI NOiei THI CUA
N G A N H N O A N H THI DUA
NOÀY NQÀY THI DUA"

Hanoi, June 2008 (photograph by the author). fiti, along with urban change, youth, and global flows of pop culture.'^ In a way,
The poster reads, "Every person and every sector
contributes every day."
its addition to the imaginary cityscape serves as Tuan's personal intervention in his
Utopian landscape, a kind of wishful projection of or proposal for urban moder-
Saigon, July 2008, and Hanoi, June 2008 nity from the perspective of a returned Viet kieu (overseas Vietnamese) artist.
(photographs by the author)
The juxtaposition of these visual elements was a deliberate compositional
decision by the artist, but, in addition, their dialogic positioning also suggests the
parallels between the intentions of socialist propaganda and socialist realist art
and the objectives of capitalist advertising, or what Michael Schudson has called
"capitalist realism." In his comparison of the two forms of visual production,
Schudson acknowledges the differences in their surface qualities and their emo-
tional intensities. But in terms of their ideological functions, he argues that "both
forms subordinate everything to a message that romanticizes the present or the
potential of the present. If the visual aesthetic of socialist realism is designed to
12. Tuan in conversation with the author. Ho Chi
dignify the simplicity of human labor in the service of the state, the aesthetic of
Minh City, 'Vietnam, July i6, 2008. capitalist realism—without a master plan of purposes—glorifies the pleasures and

4? artjournal
 freedoms of consumer choice in defense of the virtues of private life and material
ambitions." '^ This visual interplay of ideological messages continues to be a driv-
ing interest for Tuan in his artistic work as a member of the art collaborative the
Propeller Group, which he cofounded with Phu Nam Thuc Ha in late 2006.'*
Tuan's original focus on the palimspestic nattn-e of the Vietnamese cityscape
has expanded to a broader engagement with the fraught interplay of signs of
communism and capitalism as mediated through transnational cultural flows, at
times manifested through diverse forms of popular ctilture such as hip-hop and
sports. Tuan's preoccupation with ideological systems and the ambivalence of
their icons and signs took root in Vietnam, when Tuan first returned to settle
in Ho Chi Minh City in 2004 (having left with his family as a refugee in 1978).
The Proposalfora Vietnamese Landscape series emerged from research he carried out on
Vietnam's first generation of graffiti artists and his production (in collaboration
with Phu Nam) of a 2006 documentary called Spray It, Don't Say It. During this time
he met many of the graffiti and hip-hop artists with whom he would later col-
laborate, and several of the graffiti artists worked on the Proposal paintings. In look-
ing back on that series, Tuan sees the paintings as a type of "aesthetic artifact"
of the documentary on graffiti. His preoccupation with urban space and visual
propaganda first began with an interest in how a new form of artistic expression
connected to what Tuan missed from the United States (as he said, "reverting
back to what I needed to find here") and was becoming embedded in the
Vietnamese urban fabric.'*
As aesthetic artifacts, the paintings invoke obsolescence in several ways.
Beyond the forms of signage, whose physical forms have outlived or will outlive
their original symbolic meanings, as with Barthes's notion of emptied signifieds,
the paintings for Tuan also served as an initial working sketch, or a platform, for
how to engage these ideas in conceptual artistic practice. The process of creating
the layered paintings was later "translated" to moving images in the Propeller
Group's Uh video (2007), which superimposed the word "uh" in graffiti-tag style
as a motionless layer over the everyday movement of street life in various loca-
tions in Saigon; it thus drew once more on the idea of an imagined landscape,
in which a reactionary and liberated art form takes root in the context of a late-
socialist Vietnamese urban setting.
13. Michael Schudson, "Advertising as Capitalist In 2008 Tuan revisited his earlier interest in hip-hop music and culture as a
Realism," in Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its vehicle of Vietnamese—US transnational imaginaries in a collaborative series of
Dubious Impact on American Society (New York:
Basic Books, 1984), 218. works with the young Vietnamese rapper known as Wowy (who had done some
14. The Propeller Group is comprised of Phu of the graffiti for the Proposal series) and Allan Hayslip, a music producer based in
Nam Thuc Ha, Matt Lucero, and Tuan Andrew
Nguyen. According to their mission statement,
Vietnam and the United States. Tuan was fascinated with Wowy's lyrics and the
"The Propeller Group is an art collaborative . .. rapper's take on hip-hop, and how in general a certain segment of Vietnamese
that specializes in media production, using popular
culture, cinema, television, advertising, the inter-
youth took on hip-hop personas, even if they didn't ftilly understand the social
web, the gallery, museums, writings, interviews meanings and cultural origins of the movement. Tuan later came to understand
and conversation to distribute and disseminate how hip-hop was a means for a generation of young people in Vietnam to con-
art projects. The Propeller Group's projects have
been about collapsing media strategies of power, nect to a larger global community and nexus of cultural currents, a way for them
distribution, and access to information as weli as to embody the trappings of a global virban culture. While some of them have done
issues of public vs. private space within the devel-
opment of sub-cultures and popular cultures." in-depth research into the roots and meaning of hip-hop as a social movement
Propeller Group website, at http://propeller- and musical style, for others, it simply holds a powerful performative appeal. For
group.com/ (as of May 3. 2011).
Tuan, the most engaging aspect of this connection occurred at the level of lan-
15. Tuan in conversation with the author. Ho Chi
Minh City, Vietnam, February 12, 2011. guage and the affective currents facilitated by music:

50 FALL 2 0 1 2
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, in collaboration It is about language, about the power of the written and spoken word as a
with Wowy, Hip Hop History Sampling Hip
Hop History: The Red Remix, 2008, digital
means of engaging, querying, and embracing an articulation of self, a self
C-print. 13% X 17'A in. (35 x 45 cm) (artwork which is an inherent product of a particular past as lived through popular
© Tuan Andrew Nguyen)
media. . . .This body of work articulates the cultural manifestation of a
desire to be part of a popular culture which ironically perpetuates and casts
Vietnam as a cipher of trauma, of violence, a wound, a mistake, and yet the
very energy and eagerness to which Vietnamese youth embrace this medium
indicates a positive defiance of the current complex social dilemmas of a
country struggling to move on and beyond the context of violence and war.'*"

In what can be described as an anthropological undertaking. Hip Hop Histoiy

Sampling Hip Hop History: The Red Remix (2008) attempted to explore Wowy's own per-
ceptions of self and identity through transnational cross-representations of mar-
ginalization, street culture, and youth resistance through the lyrics and rhythms
of hip-hop. Tuan was interested in both sides of the phenomenon: how a young
urban Vietnamese artist perceived, understood, and appropriated American hip-
hop and, on the other side, how American musicians, and rap artists in particular,
have long appropriated "Vietnam" in their lyrics and musical careers, for exam-
ple, the East Coast rap artist Brian Daniel Carenard, better known by his stage
name, Saigon.'' Naturally, Vietnam has been used in most hip-hop and rap songs
i6. Excerpt from artist's statement, at www.
galeriequynh.com/gq/exhibitions/OSWords.htm
as a metaphor for war and oppression, and for the victory of the underdog in
(as of November 30. 2012). David vs. Goliath scenarios (e.g., the guerrilla tactics used by the Viet Cong during

51 artjournal
 oi
^

'. Ko
Víé^Mctm

To •' S711650A.
-M Wie

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, in collaboration the Vietnam War). Tuan and Wowy worked together to compile a list of songs that
with Wowy, detail of Letters from Saigon
fo Saigon, 2008, digital C-print, 33 x 43 'A in.
used the word "Vietnam" in the lyrics, and Hayslip made a seven-minute mix
(84 X I 10 cm) (artwork © Tuan Andrew Nguyen) of those American hip-hop songs featuring the word. The music mix was then
broadcast from an old-fashioned speaker, a device once used to project propa-
ganda and now more commonly used by itinerant vendors, fixed to the back of
a bicycle and pedaled slowly through the streets. Another obsolete artifact, the
speakers are leftover apparatuses from the period of economic hardship during
17. According to the exhibition press release, the
rapper Saigon "ironically adopted the name as what is known as the subsidy period (1975-86), when Vietnam's Communist gov-
a reminder of racial oppression of blacks in the ernment attempted to carry out a series of economic development reforms after
US. While doing jail time, Saigon came across the
Wallace Terry book Bloods: Stock Veterans of the the unification of the country''* It was a period in which, according to Tuan,
Vietnam War, An Oral History, which chronicles sending the message of socialist propaganda still carried a sense of urgency. The
the experiences of black men who felt they were
fighting, in addition to a foreign enemy, racial performative and public aspect of the piece consisted of Tuan accompanying
tensions with their white American soldiers." Wowy as he wheeled the bicycle around the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, while
Press release at v^/vw/.galeriequynh.com/press/
quiet_shiny_press_release.pdf (as of November
Phu Nam photographed their progress for documentation. The performance also
30, 2012). recalled the early days of hip-hop in the 1970s, when DJ Kool Here, considered
18. The subsidy period is loosely framed as to be the founder of hip-hop, used speakers in the back of his car to project
following unification in 1975 and preceding the
market-oriented economic reforms in 1986; the new form of music as he drove through the streets of the Bronx. The main
however, there is some ambiguity about this response from the local public to Wowy's street procession was curiosity, the
temporal framing, because attempts to instate a
centrally planned economy had begun in the north general response to anything considered a spectacle.
in the 1950s, and major changes toward a market As part of the gallery installation of the work, the photographs were dis-
economy did not begin until 1991, when aid
from the Soviet Union came to an end. See Ken played along with Letters from Saigon to Saigon, a series of letters that Wowy had
Maclean, "The Rehabilitation of an Uncomfortable written to the hip-hop artist Saigon, addressed to the rapper at his former repre-
Past: Everyday Life in Vietnam during the Subsidy
Period (1975-19B6)," History and Anthropology 19
sentative agency, Atlantic Records. Wowy's letters, written in Vietnamese with a
(September 2008): 281—303, esp. 298. smattering of slang and hip-hop lingo, and translated into English for the exhibi-

52 FALL 2 0 1 2
 tion, attempted to establish a dialogue with the artist kno-wn as Saigon, telling
the American artist about his own work as a rapper in Vietnam, the lack of aware-
ness about hip-hop in Vietnam, and his curiosity as to -why the American rapper
adopted the name of a city in his country. As far as Tuan and his collaborators
know, the letters reached their destination but never received a response from
Saigon or Atlantic Records.
Another component of the larger project comprised an installation work.
Take Cover, Take Care (2008), which built on the notion of transnational, urban-
subculture imaginaries pertaining to Vietnam. Noticing that Wowy had often
used the term "underground" as an untranslated term in Vietnamese conversa-
tion, Tuan asked Wowy which artists he considered to be underground musicians,
Wowy listed Tupac Shakur, to Tuan's surprise. It -was apparent that Wowy under-
stood "underground" in a different way than did Tuan, for whom underground
signaled those cultural practices that had to operate outside or below the main-
stream, and who saw Shakur as attaining a mass, popular foUo-wing and therefore
not operating at an underground level. Wowy seemed to understand the term
"underground" hterally, in reference to particular lyrics in American rap songs,
such as in Shakur's 1991 album titled 2Pacalypse Now, which mentioned the Viet
Cong in association with the Cu Chi tunnels and the "underground" tactics used
in guerrilla warfare. The dialogue evokes how meaning is shaped across transna-
tional cultural flows, jumbling symbolic and literal imagery. Tuan tried to capture
this transformation in Take Cover,Take Care, an installation consisting of manhole
covers—objects that block access to what lies underground.
Tuan worked with a Vietnamese artisan to engrave text on two manhole cov-
ers, one with lyrics from Shakur's "I Don't Give a Fuck" from the album 2Pacalypse
Now, the other with lyrics by Wowy. The installation also incorporated a performa-
tive, almost ceremonial, aspect, as the old sewage drain cover (located outside the
door to the gallery in which the final work was shown), engraved with Shakur's
lyrics, was replaced with the cover engraved with Wo-wy's lyrics, placed face down
into the ground, forever hidden from public view."'Translated into English, Wowy's
lyrics read;
My mom said that i -was born to the -wrong house
but i just quietly smile and answer that it's okay,
i know my mom won't understand 'cause the things i say have so much
subtext
when my mom is me then she'll understand the words of the under-
ground.'"
The moment of the work's installation in the sidewalk was documented
in a photograph, and the new manhole cover engraved with Wo-wy's lyrics was
exhibited face down in the gallery, in a metal frame with a mirror at the base, so
that visitors could read the inverted text. According to Tuan, Take Cover, Take Care
19. This exhibition. Quiet Shiny Words/Cultural "brings to mind gravestones, memorials, and graffiti. It blurs the line between
Doppelgängers, took place at Galerie Quynh, Ho the 'monumental' and the 'underground' giving way to more complex under-
Chi Minh City's primary commercial contempo-
rary art gallery, june 26-July 19, 2008. standings of American hip hop and ways in which the youth in Vietnam have
20. Excerpt from artist's statement, with lyrics connected with it."^'
trans. Tuan, at www.galeriequynh.com/gq/exhibl-
tions/QSWords.htm (as of May 3. 2011). In 2009, Tuan's attention -was caught by a notice of the erection of a national
21. Ibid. monument commemorating the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk Thich

53 artjournal
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Take Cover, Take Quang Due on June 16,1963, a moment that shocked viewers worldwide who saw
Care, 2008, digital C-print, 23ys x 23ya in. (60 x
60 cm) (artwork © Tuan Andrew Nguyen)
it in news coverage of the escalating war in Vietnam. The self-immolation was
carried out as a protest against acts of violent repression of the Buddhist commu-
Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Enemy's Enemy: nity, carried out by the strongly Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem regime. The American
A Monument to a Monument, Prototype 2A,
2009, carved baseball bat, ht. 34% in. (87 cm) government had initially supported Diem, but his administration was widely crit-
(artwork © Tuan Andrew Nguyen) icized for its autocratic and nepotistic style, and its repressive and violent treat-
ment of the Buddhist population. Tuan saw it as ironic and even hypocritical for
the current Commimist government to install a memorial to a martyr protesting
discrimination against Buddhists, given the current regime's attitude toward reli-
gion, for which it has been criticized by human-rights groups. These develop-
ments prompted Tuan to re-engage the idea of memorializing, monuments,
ideological confrontations, and aesthetic artifacts. Seeking an alternative symbol
of an ideology oppositional to communism, Tuan was intrigued by baseball as a
metaphor for the American military legacy. While baseball continues to hold pop-
tilar resonance in east Asia and Latin America, it has never taken root in Vietnam.
Tuan sees the baseball bat as a symbol of'violence, an object of immanent threat
in its symbolic and physical form. One can easily imagine the emotional intensity
that runs through crowds at sporting events and political rallies, and how these
two arenas often rouse nationalist fervor. So he attempted to render the baseball
bat powerless by carving away its volume to replicate the very statue of Thich
Quang Due in flames that the state was planning to build as a memorial. The

54 FALL 2 0 1 2
The Propeller Group, still from TVC baseball bat was transformed into an exoskeletal form instantly recognizable in an
Communism, 201 I, television commercial
animatic, 60 sec. looped, color, stereo, based
Asian context due to its ornate decorative qualities, referencing woodcarving tra-
onfive-channelvideo installation, synchronized, ditions and religious ornament, such as incense burners. Given the impermanent
5 hrs., 45 min., 5.1 surround sound (artwork nature of wooden objects, the materiality of the work belies the monumentalism,
© The Propeller Group)
of standard memorials in bronze, iron, or stone. Returning to a theme that runs
through Tuan's conceptual practice, the sculpture also evokes the events that cata-
lyzed the escalation of the Vietnam War: the American government's staunch sup-
port of Catholic, pro-capitalist Diem, initially seen as afigurewith the potential
to divert the course of communist expansion in south Vietnam, and whose harsh
treatment of the Buddhist community led to an act of self-immolation by a
monk.'^ In its program to ingrain patriotic sentiment in citizens by dotting the
landscape with nationalist monuments, the state commemorates an event that
feels not so far removed in time or political context. Tuan's sculpture Enemy's
Enemy: A Monument to a Monument (2009) comments on the renegotiation of histori-
cal narratives and paradoxical meshing of ideologies promoted by the govern-
ment in its effort to redeem the authority of the socialist state through attempts
at shaping societal consciousness.
Tuan's collaborative body of work with the Propeller Group since the Proposal
22. Ngo Dinh Diem's regime v/as toppled in a for a Vietnamese Landscape series has continued to investigate issues of urban change
coup supported by the American government and visual culttire in a late-socialist society oriented to capitalist consumption. In
on November i, 1963. Ngo Dinh Diem and his
brother Ngo Dinh Nhu fled but were captured the Propeller Group's commissioned video work for the 2011 Singapore Biennale,
the next day and, allegedly under the orders of TVC Communism, the members contracted three different transnational advertising
Duong Van Minh, a senior general in the Army
of the Republic of Vietnam, executed in the back companies with branches in Vietnam to create commercials for communism.
of an armored military vehicle en route to the They provided each company with guidelines and notes, including a timeline
Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters.
Minh then assumed leadership of the Democratic titled "A Brief History of TVC Communism," which outlined a history of com-
Republic of Vietnam. munism and major events in which its ideology clashed with or encountered

56 FALL 2 0 1 2
 moments of affinity with capitalism. It was initially a hard sell, as the advertisers
shied away from the very word communism, and the Propeller Group had to
work hard to market the project, using commercial and media language rather
than artistic or critical arguments.^'The initial conception for the piece com-
prised afive-channelprojection, with segments screened at diflerent moments,
forcing the viewer—located in the cross-fire of dialogue—to change physical
direction and bodily orientation to follow the narrative. Due to technical limita-
tions at the Biennale, the work was projected on one large screen in mtiltiple
frames, so viewers had to negotiate multiple sources of stimuli on one screen,
selectively engaging the various scenarios.^*
The concept of "selling" communism, or recrafting its image to revive
its ideological popularity via advertising media, and then exhibiting it in the con-
text of a biennial exhibition, re-engages a paradoxical discourse: that socialism,
throughout history, has at many times been the avatar of capitalism at particular
moments, when seemingly distinct ideological utterances and visual images dis-
23. Tuan in conversation with the author. Ho Chi play remarkable parallels.^'^ For Tuan, this conceptual premise was set in motion
Minh City, Vietnam, February 12, 2011. by his decision to resettle in Vietnam. Living there has continued to feed his prac-
24. At the time of this article's publication, TVC
Communism has been shown in the New Museum
tice conceptually, as he has created work about state and market ideologies, trans-
Triennial, The Ungovernables, in February 2012, and national fiows of popular youth culture, and the fraught relationships between
in the first Los Angeles biennial. Made In LA. 2012,
spearheaded by the Hammer Museum, in June.
historical narratives and contemporary processes of memoriahzation."*' As a
25. Susan Buck-Morss has argued that the failure member of the Propeller Group art collaborative and its production company,
of socialism in the twentieth century was in large
Tuan has also directed his energies to the realm of commercial media produc-
part due to the fact that it mimicked capitalism
too faithfully. Boris Groys has suggested that one tion, an endeavor that he and his collaborators Phu Nam and Lucero have eagerly
significant point of affinity between socialist real- pursued. Their interest in collapsing the boundaries between high art and mass
ism and Western modernism lay in their mutual
search for purification from external influences, in media is outlined in their statement:
one case the expression of the liberation of man
from the forces of the market, and in the other, In many of our projects, we try to create disorder, hoping that disorder in
the purification of art from all suggestions of mass
visual culture. See Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and
such partictilar instances can become another "sense of order" to an audi-
Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East ence that may be all too afraid of change or unable to accept other possible
and West (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 2000),
ways of engaging with their current social structures. We like to play. We
and Boris Groys, "A Style and a Half: Socialism
between Modernism and Postmodernism," align ourselves with different cultural producers. We like to let ourselves get
in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. Thomas ingested into the bellies of big social beasts such as television, advertising,
Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997), 76-77.
or the various manifestations of pop-culture. We feel that true criticality
26. In a Propeller Group interview with Zoe Butt, comes from the change that can happen from within a system and not from
Tuan talked about the nature of the inspiration he
analytical discourse posited from external positions.^'
has found living and working in Vietnam: "There's
a certain magic that comes with places that are
Pamela N. Corey is a doctoral candidate in the history of art and visual studies department at Cornell
changing this fast. There's a strange energy that
University. Her general research interests include Southeast Asian art history, modern and contemporary
fills the air here (besides the pollution) I'm drawn
art, and urban studies. Her dissertation is a comparative study of the development of contemporary art
to that. . . . As with everything else in Vietnam,
and its relationship to urbanization in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
contemporary art and the dialogues surrounding
'contemporary' are developing, morphing. There
are certain discussions that could be had here that
wouldn't be as relevant or as interesting if they
were had elsewhere. Different histories give way
for different concerns. And different concerns
allow for a variety of perspectives on a variety
of things to open up." Zoe Butt, "The Propeller
Group Interview with Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phu
Nam Thuc Ha, and Matt Lucero," pub. May 13,
2010, at Virww.curatorsinti.org/images/uploads/
propellerpdf (as of November 30, 2012).
27. See www.the-propeller-group.com/word-
press/wp-content/uploads/2oii/io/2oii_O3_
SingaporeBiennale.pdf (as of November 30, 2012).

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Art Journal © 2012 College Art Association.