Nguyen Thai Tuan

In the monography on Nguyen Thai Tuan, the Italian art critic Demetrio Paparoni states:

“Against the backdrop of Nguyen Thai Tuan’s Paintings there is always Vietnam, with its symbolic places and its history. The stories in these pictures draw upon real events, news images and images of daily life that are normally filtered through photographs, newspapaers, television or Internet. While always referring to historical events and real occurrences, the subject of his works is not the event as such, but rather its repercussios that generate the shadowy areas in the psyche of the individual while influencing that individual’s everyday life. Accrdingly, Nguyen Thai Tuan’s interest is directed towards the behaviors and the existensial dynamics of both those who induce these events and those who endure them.

In remarking that current condition is the result of the sedimentation of historical evets and happenings, Nguyen Thai Tuan intermingles the past and the present, rendering the painting a critical space in which his reflections take shape.”

For instance, the Black Painting n. 40(1955), critically refers to the Vietnam Land Reform of 1955.  The 5-phase land reform resulted in a bloodbath all over North Vietnam.

Genuine information related to this event is extremely scarce and is almost impossible to establish a clear picture of this massacre. Because of thecniques of falsification and censorship under Ho Chi Minh’s regime, the world was completely unaware of this catastrophe.

Hundreds of thausands people, accused of being landlords, were summarily executed or sent to concentration camps for “rieducation”.

Hoang Van Hoan – a former member of the Hanoi communist Politburo who fled the country in September 1979 – described the situation in that period:

“unjust and false verdicts imposed on the victims were concealed and were never brought to light for verification. Those who had been erroneously classified and accused were never exonerated. Grievances against the Party accumulated during the reform campaign have taken root in everyone’s heart and have remained intense to this moment.”

In this painting the past permeates the present, till the point to superimpose on it, creating an emotional correspondence on the contemporary individual that has to fight for his individuality against an always unknown power.