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Tran Trung Tin: Memories of War in Vietnam
From: The British Museum
| By:
Sherry Buchanan |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Tran Trung Tin, a painter and actor with no formal training, is considered one of the great dissenting voices in war art. Painting at a time when only propagandist art was supported by the Vietnamese government, his images speak to the tragedy of the two wars he experienced in a poignant, naïve style. Sheri Buchanan, an independent scholar at the British Museum, integrates the fascinating story of his life with a discussion of Tran Trung Tin's paintings. |
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| Tran Trung Tin as a young man. | |
 'll refer here to Tran Trung Tin as Tin, because it is his first name, and it means 'truthfulness,' which reflects how he conducts his life and paints his oils on newspaper. He signs his paintings simply, 'Tin'. |
He was born in French colonial Vietnam in 1933, and he fought the independence war against the French, which broke out in 1946 and lasted nine years. He then lived in Hanoi where he was a successful actor, and started to paint in 1969, three years into the Vietnam War. His painting is in an expressionist style; he was self-taught and he painted on whatever he could find, which was mostly newspaper, as the newspaper was freely available in Hanoi during the war. One of the main newspapers used was the Communist Party's paper, The People's Voice. He also painted on rice sacks that he collected and sewed together. |
His inspiration came from his memories of war as a boy soldier in the Indo-China War. When he saw the suffering happening in Vietnam again, painting was the freest means of expression that he could find, because censorship was very strict at that time. Art was propaganda, geared to support the war effort, and anything that showed suffering was considered negative publicity. So, for Tin to paint for example a nude woman with a gun was considered quite different from the official style, which was Socialist Realism. He did not just paint the suffering; he also painted the hope and resilience of the Vietnamese people, through his series on "Mother and Child", which symbolises life renewing itself. |
The power of his images comes from his inner necessity to express his rage and anger at a world gone mad. He says that if he hadn't started to paint he would have committed suicide. This is a strong statement from an artist who is reserved about showing and communicating personal feeling. When Tin came back to Hanoi in 1954, it was at the end of the war when the French lost at Dien Bien Phu. He settled in Hanoi, and he was chosen to be one of the first graduates of the new film institution in Hanoi that was being created in the mid 1950s. He is an extraordinarily handsome, eloquent man and he got a starring role within his second year of film school. He became increasingly disillusioned with propaganda films that he felt killed any creativity. As an artist, he craved freedom of expression and felt constricted by petty bureaucrats enforcing artificial artistic codes. He wrote a poem poking fun at official censorship. He was temporarily arrested and interrogated. The interrogation lasted a whole day. It left him angry and sad and he spent the next few years drinking heavily. He says of that time: "I completely lost my way." |
It was the intensification of the bombings during the Vietnam War that finally led him to express his inner rage and frustration at the futility and agony of war in painting. "Painting is the language of silence, and I said in painting what I couldn't say in words." A friend, who went to see him in those first days of creation, found him in a trance-like state. He was ecstatically happy at having discovered the medium through which he could express the feelings he had repressed for so long. He painted day and night. Between 13 and 15 million tons of bombs were dropped on the country, or the equivalent of four Hiroshima nuclear bombs. Two million Vietnamese died in the war, and more than a million women fought at the front in terrible conditions. |
Tin experienced war as a young soldier fighting against the French, and his memories came back to haunt him. He called his first painting "The Optimistic Tragedy." It is the figure of a man, sitting down on some steps, holding his head in his hands--he has thrown away the book. The book is the tragedy of the '-isms' of the twentieth century that led to terrible wars. The optimistic part of the tragedy is that the man who has thrown away the book, the artist, can protest through his creativity against man's inhumanity to man. Over the next five years, Tin painted more than one thousand works on newspaper and rice sacks: orphaned children, lone female figures naked against distressed empty backgrounds symbolise the vulnerability of North Vietnam's militia women who fought at the front. He shows women with guns and flowers, the image of innocence harmed but not lost, men drinking alone, portraits of men and women, scarred and terrorised. |
Tin painted Christians and Buddhists who implore absent gods, their eyes turned towards the heavens pleading, wondering, When will the unnecessary suffering end? He painted Hanoi cityscapes, serene and calm, even though the bombings were going on almost daily and nightly. He was one man with the courage to stand up and be counted through the small images he painted on newspaper. |
Tin was socially ostracised because his paintings did not conform to the Social Realism style in practice at the time. Former friends crossed the street rather than be seen talking to him. His family did not understand what he was painting or why. Nudes, for instance, were considered bourgeois and decadent and were banned by the government. There was one artist in Hanoi who admired his work. The artist was classically trained, well established and well known. His name was Bui Xuan Phai and today he is recognised as one of Vietnam's great masters. This friendship was a great support and encouragement for Tin, who accepted his isolation as the price he had to pay for the freedom he had finally found through painting.
 "Girl, Gun, Flower" is the image for which Tin is best known. There was no art market in North Vietnam, so he really painted because he had the need to express what he wanted to express. There were no private galleries or exhibitions. There were official exhibitions of war drawings. Tin painted in series because the need to express himself was so great. He was in a creative frenzy; he thought that by repeating it over and over again in different colours or different modes or moods, he could finally exorcise the anger and frustration. His "Girl, Gun, Flower" was quite radical at the time, because the official propaganda image was of heroic women with guns going off to fight, produced in order to encourage them to join the militias. Since they were fighting such superior foes, the Americans, they had to mobilise the entire population, and the propaganda was needed in order to get people to support this war of national salvation, reunification with the south. Tin wanted to portray the suffering of women at the front, which, again, he had seen in Cambodia when he was fighting the French in the Vietnam War of Independence. And for that he portrays them nude, with a flower, their eyes lifted to Heaven, a gun the only symbol of war. |
 "She Couldn't Study" was painted after 1975 in Saigon, when Tin went back to the south where he was originally from. It is the portrait of a young girl who has to leave school to support her family, which was the fate of many young women in Saigon. Reunification did not bring economic prosperity. Women were left without husbands, brothers, sons. Many were killed in the war, and many who worked for the South Vietnamese government were sent to re-education camps. |
 "Waiting" was also painted in Saigon after 1975. It depicts ghostly figures, nameless people, waiting to see what's going to happen next. It's a very abstract painting and very vivid with brilliant colours. The sky is swirled, confusing if not ominous. The people wonder what their fate will be. The people are the "boat people" who left Vietnam in the thousands, risking their lives on the South China Sea in small fisherman's boats. They have no mouths to speak with, only eyes, windows on a world in which they have lost all hope. |
Tin had painted images of ghostly figures in Hanoi to depict orphans and abandoned children whose only humanity left is in the soulfullness of their eyes. When Tin was seven years old, the teacher in the French colonial school told the class to make a wish. Tin wrote in his copybook: "I want to be a brave mouth." |
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