"Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name, on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, March 15, 2019 to August 18, 2019."
Tran Trung Tin painted in Hanoi during the 60s and 70s, conveying the experience of the Vietnamese and the essence of human emotion in his images. When he was 12, he joined the Resisitance against the French who were occupying Vietnam at the time, devoting his youth to freeing his country only to be disappointed by the repression and misery that folowed. Living in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, forbidden to express himself in words, he turned to painting to communicate the contradictions of his time.
Patrick Cullinan is the first member of the Australian Defence Force to climb Mount Everest. He achieved this as part of the 1988 Australian Bicentennial Everest Expedition.Patrick's journey to the summit of Everest start with his days as a cadet at Duntroon and continued through his time as the commander of Climbing Troop at the Special Air Service Regiment. He take us up Mount Gauri Shankar in Nepal (his apprenticeship), Broad Peak in Pakistan (the rehearsal) and then finally to Everest with the Bicentennial Expedition. The Expedition team decided to forgo the usual practice of using climbing sherpas. This prompted the Sherpa Sungdare, who at the time had climbed Everest five times, to say to one of the Australian expedition members, 'You guys are White Sherpas.'
Painting has played a significant role in modern Vietnam. Postage stamps, billboards, and annual national exhibitions attest to its fundamental place in a country where painters may be hailed as national heroes and include among their number fervent nationalists, propagandists, even dissidents. As Vietnamese painting has gained prominence in the contemporary transnational art circuits of Southeast Asia, many artists have become millionaires, yet Vietnamese painting is generally overlooked in art history surveys of the region. Nora Taylor sets out here to change that. Painters in Hanoi engages with twentieth-century Vietnam through its artists and their works, providing a new angle on a country most often portrayed through the lens of war and politics. Drawing on interviews with artists, cultural officers, curators, art critics, and others in Hanoi, Taylor surveys the impact artists have had on intellectual life in Vietnam. The book shows them within their own complex community, one fraught with tensions, politicking, and favoritism, yet also a sense of belonging. It describes their education, the role of the government in the arts, the rise and fall of individual artists, their influence as active players in the politics of place and gender, the audience for their work, and how tourism and the international art market have influenced it.