‘TÔI & MOI', a solo exhibition by Trần Trọng Vũ
By Professor Nora A. Taylor

The following essay was written in response to ‘TÔI & MOI', a debut solo exhibition by Trần Trọng Vũ in Paris. Curated by Lê Thiên-Bảo, the show features paintings created in the last 20 years, from 2002 to 2022.

‘TÔI & MOI' runs from 6 October to 12 November 2022 at Galerie A2Z, Paris, France.

Portrait of Trần Trọng Vũ at his home, Antony, 2022. Image courtesy of Professor Ngô Bảo Châu.

When Trần Trọng Vũ first arrived in Paris in 1989, he carried a heavy load with him. Not so much in terms of luggage, as he had very little besides the clothes on his back, but more in terms of his emotional baggage. Born in Hanoi at the start of the American war in 1964, he grew up during the most challenging times in Vietnamese history. Besides violence, famine and poverty, his family suffered political injustice and censorship. His father, in particular, writer and poet Trần Dần (1926-1997) had been jailed and blacklisted after the publication of his poem Nhất Định Thắng (Certain Victory) in 1956. A brilliant writer who had been praised for his novel Người Người Lớp Lớp (People, Waves) published after the Việt Minh victory at Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, he joined the group of writers who founded the literary journals Nhân Văn Giai Phẩm. Both journals were eventually discontinued and the contributors were punished. Growing up in an atmosphere of persecution and censorship had a deep impact on Vũ and his work. He studied painting at the Hanoi University of Fine Arts before setting off to Europe and settling in France, where he was granted a scholarship at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. From that time forward, his work has centered on displacement, memory and language.

Trần Trọng Vũ is installing artwork ‘La quatrième dimension du bleu’, 2022 at A2Z Art Gallery, Paris, October 2022. Image courtesy of A2Z Art Gallery.

Although he has lived in France for over three decades, Vietnam has never left him nor his work. After his father’s death in 1997, he started incorporating phrases from his father’s writings into his paintings, like the slogans that one would find on propaganda posters but with an ironic twist, a parody or a pun. They stem from the cynicism that many of his generation feel toward their government. He grew up weary of what he considered to be the empty rhetoric displayed in propaganda posters. He writes his words in French, translated from Vietnamese, borrowed from his father’s poetry as if to mirror the move from his home country to his adopted one. “J’appartiens au parti des larmes,” or “I belong to the party of tears”, a phrase his father uttered during his interrogation, became a leitmotiv in Vũ’s work, emblematising the sorrow of exile both within the writer’s native land, having been ostracized by the Communist party, and his son’s migration to France and melancholic longing for his homeland. Tears also became raindrops, echoing the final lines his father’s poem Certain Victory, describing the raindrops that he observed falling on red flags, and then faucets and toilets, satirising the country’s modernisation efforts after economic reforms known as Đổi Mới while playing on the concept of brainwashing and the nonsense that emanates from the mouths of politicians. These word associations with water and bodily functions were accompanied by generic figures that also became a recurring motif in his paintings. These anonymous people – men or women or gender- neutral, it is hard to tell – are drawn in the simplest of forms, in dark outlines that contour their faces and outfits coloured with the shades of the Vietnamese flag, red and yellow. These faces are represented with wide opened mouths, a gesture that could signal a smile or a laugh, in a somewhat disconcerting way. Are they mocking us, the viewer? Are they perpetually happy or is their smile forced? Is the emotion real – can you trust it? The smile becomes particularly ambiguous when it appears in conjunction with a situation involving pain such as a tap running over it or a rope hanging above it.

Trần Trọng Vũ, ‘Blessure’, 2022, oil on canvas, 135 x 210cm. Private collection. Image courtesy of A2Z Art Gallery.

Trần Trọng Vũ, ‘Rouge est Jaune’, 2021-2022, acrylic on canvas, 115 x 85cm. Image courtesy of A2Z Art Gallery.

The title of this exhibition encapsulates the past two decades of his work and his reflections on his journey from Vietnam to France and his perpetual exile. “Toi et Moi” means “you and I” in French, but if you add Vietnamese diacritics, it can read as “I” (tôi) and extraction (moi)” thus playing on his double sense of identity and memory and their homonyms in the French and Vietnamese language. In the exhibition, ‘Blessure’ (Wound) features figures stuck in a hole with no visible exit. It seems to suggest the anxiety of being perpetually alienated, of never being able to leave one’s country in one’s mind or arriving somewhere only to be estranged from one’s surroundings. Many of his works make use of the colors of the Vietnamese flag, red and yellow. In ‘Rouge et Jaune’ (Red and Yellow), a red tube squirts yellow paint. The caption reads “red is yellow so yellow is not red”, an absurdity that reminds one of René Magritte’s (1898-1967) famous painting of a pipe that reads “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe), and the perils of reading an image literally. Vũ’s painting invites viewers to question the veracity of words, which could extend to propaganda posters. It can also mean that Vietnam is Vietnam so Vietnam is not Vietnam, and that what one sees is not the truth.

Trần Trọng Vũ, ‘Nostalgie d’une beauté’, 2022, oil on canvas, 75 x 115cm. Image courtesy of A2Z Art Gallery.

Trần Trọng Vũ, ‘Planète jaune’, 2008, oil on canvas, 54 x 66cm. Private collection. Image courtesy of A2Z Art Gallery

Another painting, ‘Nostalgie d’une beauté’ (Nostalgia of a beauty), illustrates this juxtaposition of opposite forces, depicting a bed of beautiful flowers infested with flies. The contrast between the colorful blooms and the insects is unsettling. Like the words on propaganda paintings that promise bright futures and positive outlooks but omit the harsher realities of life, the creatures that pollute the image present the darker side of the truth, the flip side of life. With such paintings, Vũ is not necessarily trying to reveal the ugly sides of Vietnamese culture. Rather, he is pointing at the contradictions and ambiguities that come with political rhetoric and national stereotypes. His art is about the impossibility of reconciling memory with identity, and the impossibility of forgetting it. Like the character in his painting ‘Planète jaune’ (Yellow planet), he finds himself stuck on the yellow star of the Vietnamese flag feeling like an alien, wondering “me suis-je trompée de planète?” (am I on the wrong planet?), without any sense of belonging, either to France or Vietnam.

About the Writer
Nora A Taylor is an art historian who specialises in Vietnamese modern and contemporary art. She is the Alsdorf Chair and Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (Hawaii Press, 2004, reprinted in 2009 at NUS Press), editor of Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor (Cornell Press, 2000) and co-editor with Boreth Ly of Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology (Cornell seap Press, 2012). She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2013.