From the Academy to Revolution

This talk will look at the construction of Vietnamese socialist realism from 1945 to 1954, during the war of anti-colonial resistance and the formation of the state Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Polemical struggles and aesthetic shifts can be seen in the formation of the new School of Fine Arts and the National Fine Arts Exhibitions. The discursive exchanges show shared political aspirations for the revolution, but the construction of what becomes socialist realism in northern Vietnam was neither a clear rupture from the past nor a foregone conclusion. It was a gradual searching, negotiation and reformulated synthesis of aesthetics and affiliations.

Chương-Đài Võ is a Researcher at Asia Art Archive, Hongkong where she supervises archival collections on contemporary art from Southeast Asia. Her writing can be found in publications from MOMA Warsaw (forthcoming), Afterall, Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Moderna Galerija, and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. A former Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she is currently a Chercheuse Invitée at INHA.