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Vietnam Behind the Lines: Images from the War 1965-75
From: The British Museum
| By:
Jessica Harrison-Hall |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The controversial Vietnam War has been represented and discussed widely in the West through art, television, and political debate. Rarely, however, have we been exposed to Vietnamese interpretations of one of the most critical and defining events of the twentieth century. Jessica Harrison-Hall presents the groundbreaking British Museum exhibit 'Vietnam Behind the Lines: Images from the War 1965-75', which presented a range of Vietnamese-produced images never before exhibited in the West. |
The exhibition is divided into five sections: 'Official Propaganda', 'Communications and Base Camp Life', 'Battle and the New Role of Women', 'Portraits', and 'Agriculture and Industry'. The works that are included in the first section of 'Official Propaganda' are dominated by the Socialist Realist style; they're a collection of seven posters, all of which are captioned in Vietnamese, and these captions range from encouraging the education of children to promoting continuation of agricultural production during the war. |
Propaganda
Some depict events after the war, such as the change of tanks into tractors, melting down the metal and reusing it as part of the peace process. Another group of posters are cult images promoting the power of Ho Chi Minh, even after his death in 1963. One of the most fascinating exhibits in the early section is this work by an unknown artist who has just signed with the name Luong. This is a propaganda image showing a heroic Vietnamese peasant whose bicycle is dramatically overloaded with Vietnamese produce, from different types of local paper to cooking pots shaped rather like a Chinese wok. Types of beans in drums are all overloaded on his bicycle. And beneath the weight of this local produce, both an American and a Frenchman, caricatures of those nations, are being squashed. The Frenchman is identified by his tricolour hat, and the American by the stars and stripes band around his hat, and by the dollars appearing from his top pocket. Both these foreigners have claw-like feet and toes and grey skin and are portrayed as almost cartoon-like figures, whereas our hero has a healthy flush to his skin and a full body. The produce that he's crushing beneath his wheel says 'Hang Phap' and 'Hang My'. 'Hang Phap' means 'French goods' and 'Hang My' means 'American goods'. They're imported goods, like soap and spectacles. The idea is that the Vietnamese people could survive without these imported luxury goods, and so the caption says, 'Do not sell luxury goods.' |
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| A group of schoolchildren. | |
All of the posters in the exhibition are hand-painted originals rather than prints. This one shows a group of schoolchildren, minority children from the north part of Vietnam, dressed in minority costume, with their female teacher. In the background is the shadow of the ubiquitous North Vietnamese soldier with his gun slung over his shoulder. The caption reads, 'An bo doi cua chung,' which is, 'The soldier belongs to us.' It's written in the children's voice, rather like 'tu,' in French, and the children are saying 'the soldier belongs to us, is incorporated into our lives'. The idea is that the children shouldn't be afraid of the soldiers. This was made in 1965 by Professor Nguyen Thu, who visited the British Museum as artist-in-residence. It's very much influenced by Chinese and Russian Socialist Realism. Typical of all the posters, it's painted in a limited palette, in fact, three colours: the pale green of the soldier, the black of the uniforms and the ochre colour of the shirts and details. |
Communications and life at base camp
The second section in the exhibition is 'Communications and Base Camp Life'. The way in which the images were used varied enormously. Many of the posters were displayed in exhibitions in forests to encourage people to continue agricultural production or to support Ho Chi Minh. |
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| Soldiers being entertained. | |
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This is an interesting sketch of a group of soldiers who are watching a performance. It's instantly recognisable as North Vietnam and the area near Halong Bay, because of these cast limestone rock-like islands that we can see in the water. You can also see the junks floating in between them, the traditional sailing craft moving between the rocks. The soldiers sit, surrounded by their guns and by the large artillery gun that's beside them, and watch what is probably a folk performance. The Vietnamese, during the war period, didn't have the great stars like Bob Hope going out to perform for the troops, but they did have entertainers who came to the camps in order to boost morale and to offer some moments of relief from the fighting. |
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| Soldiers relax together. | |
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The show is mixed media, comprising watercolours, paintings on silk, pencil and pen sketches, and also ink paintings. Many were used just to record the war; others were used for official purposes to illustrate pamphlets, magazines, and for display in special exhibitions. The third use was for pleasure; a lot of soldiers sketched each other. In this first section, we see a side of the North Vietnamese Army that we've never seen before in the West. Instead of the images of a faceless foe, we see these men relaxing in the jungle, listening to radio, sitting on hammocks slung between breadfruit trees and playing makeshift instruments. |
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| Playing a traditional Vietnamese instrument. | |
This one, for example, is playing a typical Vietnamese instrument, which is made out of strips of bamboo. Usually it sits on a frame but he's strung it in a makeshift way in the forest, between the trees. The artist is Quang Tho, who is actually a colonel in the Army. He was an extraordinarily brave figure who had a very open, immediate style of sketching. |
All of the paintings arrived in a pretty poor condition and have been systematically cleaned, conserved and framed for the exhibition, treated in the same way a Leonardo da Vinci would have been treated. The curators conducted an interesting research project to sample the different papers, working out which papers were machine-made, which were hand-made, and what types of coating the paper had gone through. Artists' materials were often very scarce during the war, and one finds images that are put together from three separate sheets of paper rather than one long strip, as is the case with some of the triptychs one sees in the exhibition. |
All of the art in the exhibit was collected from the artists themselves or their families. But these items are ephemeral. They've managed to survive 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War, in people's houses. They weren't paid very much attention to until recent times. Combat art isn't particularly fashionable, it's regarded in the West sometimes as quite sentimental and very representational. These pieces are gradually now being collected and preserved and saved. But some of them are preliminary sketches for larger works, and so their status is perhaps not the same as a large oil work. |
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| Bamboo mats were used in the jungle. | |
The Ho Chi Minh Trail wasn't a single route, but many different paths through the Vietnamese forests and through Laos and Cambodia. This section shows the difficulties of transporting goods and supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This is quite a dramatic painting by Quang Tho, showing how bamboo mats were laid on the jungle floor so that they could push these very heavily loaded bicycles over the surface, steered with a stick from one side.
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Women in combat
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| Women soldiers. | |
The third section of the exhibit is about battle and the new role of women. Unusually, in the Vietnam War women played a very active role--they weren't just involved in nursing and behind-the-scenes support for the war but were actually engaged in active combat. Many of the images reflect this new role of women. In fact, a Vietnamese poet called To Huu said, 'You need no beard to be a hero.' The women were often referred to as 'the long-haired army.' This image is particularly interesting because it's treated like a traditional Vietnamese New Year painting. It's painted on hand-made paper, and the surface has been coated with a layer of shell to give it a pure white background, then the colour applied to the top of the shell coating, which gives the painting this added texture and three-dimensional feel. It shows three women aiming an artillery gun in a camouflaged hut. |
Portraits
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| Portrait of a Vietnamese woman. | |
The fourth section is devoted to portraiture. Traditional Vietnamese portraiture is quite different from this style of drawing and painting. In the past, in Vietnam's early years, portraiture was focused on painting for religious purposes or ancestral portraits, which were arranged in a sort of hierarchical pattern. So this naturalistic style of portraiture really came in after the French Academy Ecole des beaux-arts was established in 1924 in Hanoi. The image that we're looking at was painted in 1957, well after the French were defeated in 1954 and before the American-Vietnam War really got under way. It shows a married woman with her hair tied up in a loose bun at the nape of her neck, reading, sitting on a French style cane chair, dressed in the traditional Vietnamese costume of an 'ao dai'. It's a side-fastening gown that has long splits almost up to the waist, but is worn over wide-bottomed trousers with sandals. At the side the artists have made sketches of her son, opening packages, with tiny details of his head and the seated child. What's interesting is the way that these papers were re-used--there will be another image, probably, on the back of this image. Materials were extraordinarily scarce. This was executed in charcoal; it's one of the few charcoal sketches in the exhibition. |
Agriculture and industry
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| Sorting aubergines. | |
This is a pencil sketch on paper showing two groups of women seated at benches. On the left hand side are the married women, who are wearing these turbans, hiding their hair, and wooden clogs. And on the right hand side, with their hair loose down their backs, are the unmarried women. They have baskets into which they're sorting a vegetable called 'ca', which is like a small aubergine. They're seated at wooden benches made out of halved trees, in a very simple setting. With a few sketches the artist has managed to evoke this laborious job of arranging these vegetables in terms of quality and size, a job that today would be done by factory machinery, perhaps. |
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| Paddy fields. | |
This is a different one, again showing agricultural production in Vietnam. This shows the farm workers producing rice. They are irrigating the fields using traditional, lacquer-covered woven baskets, and with the means of four ropes per basket, in couples, they manage to transfer gallons of water from the irrigation travels into the paddy fields in order to grow the rice. This is extraordinarily labour intensive but it's still practised in the countryside in Vietnam today. We can see the bright green seedlings, and this truly is the natural colour: even in Vietnam today you can see discarded churches in the paddy fields, contrasting pastel, French-style colours with the intense green of new paddy. |
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| A woman soldier. | |
In many of the images of women engaged at work during the war period, we see the presence of their carbines, their guns, slung either at the side of their equipment or hung on the wall, quite casually. Ever present, there are very few images that don't have the presence of a gun, an indication that the threat of war is all around them. This woman is using a hand-operated printing press, and this is the sort of pamphlet in which some of these illustrations may well have appeared. The artist has sketched her producing the pamphlet but several of the images that are displayed in the exhibition would have been illustrations in such pamphlets, to boost the war effort and to boost morale during the difficult period from 1965 to 1975. This one was located in Thanh Hoa Province and made on June 1, 1965. |
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