Comprising over 1,200 artworks, the Ambassador Dato’ N. Parameswaran Collection is one of the largest of its kind outside of Vietnam and its depth and diversity create innumerable lines of inquiry. Through three prior exhibitions NUS Museum has explored the works as a form of documentation of the Vietnamese response to the war (Vietnam 1954-1975), the use of drawing as a medium and how it was used to capture physical nature of life around the battlefields (LINES) and how art was employed in an effort to move beyond the war period by building a new narrative (“Who Wants To Remember A War?”).

In NUS Museum’s fourth and final exhibition drawn from the collection, focus is shifted once again. Wartime Artists of Vietnam specifically engages with concept of an artist’s agency; how they are pulled in multiple directions as war artists and how they reflect the war experience through art.

To mark the opening of this exhibition, we put some of our most pressing questions to the curator, Sung Yunwen.

What unites the artists who are presented in this exhibition?

Many of the Vietnamese artists joined the military and became guerrilla artists in the country’s two resistance wars, for in them throbbed both the patriotic sentiment and the creative impulse. Under extreme conditions of conflict, they negotiated between their dual identities—as both soldier and artist— and mediated between official dictates and their exercise of individual agency.

Some of their works were primarily made to boost morale and honour the people’s struggle during the war, while others were created by the artists’ personal initiatives to depict various facets of everyday activities and portray human relationships in wartime with telling and acute renderings.

These artist-soldiers were by no means passive “cultural manufacturers”. Rather, through their wartime creations, not only did they articulate their individual and collective experiences of war—hence using art as a vehicle for storytelling—but also strove to maintain a sense of creative continuity with their former art training and backgrounds. To fully grasp how these artists managed their obligations and convictions, it is necessary to take both an artistic and biographical approach to examine the ways they modified and mediated their art practices.

NUS Museum is known for the open-ended way it approaches subject matter. Visitors aren’t directly guided through a planned path to engage with the works, but are there any additional cues in this exhibition that provide context or other viewpoints?

Included alongside the artworks are excerpts of poems and memoirs written during or after the wars to explore the significance of individual experience. Further supporting texts related to the exhibited works and the general events regarding armed conflicts and art developments are also provided for visitors to help situate the contexts of the artists’ creations.

Although the entanglement between art and politics is evident in Vietnamese art generated during the era of conflict, it is important to note that many of the artist-soldiers sponsored by the government in Hanoi were also caught in a dilemma between the commitment to “art for art’s sake” and the demand for creating “national art.”

When we focus our attention on these combat artists’ wartime journeys and creations, we cannot help but observe that the stories articulated and visualised through their depictions of the multifarious facets of war are not simply about the merciless onslaught of war machines, about the rigidity of military deployments, or about the tendency to favour stalwart heroism.

Rather, like all great art, their drawings and paintings never hesitate to use immediate circumstances to expose the deeper human condition that persists beneath, namely the enduring sagas of survival and despair, endurance and vulnerability, love and separation, joy and anguish, hope and fear, as well as the unfailing undercurrents of compassion that nevertheless surface in times of war. As ambivalent testimonies of victory and loss, of glory and sorrow, the artworks presented in this exhibition not only express intense emotions and the eternal reminder of the transitory nature of life, but also reveal a subtle range of creative renderings representing the existence of artistic autonomy.

When considering the process of exhibition-making, have you taken any curatorial risks with this exhibition? What is different about how the works have been arranged or presented?

I always believe that as a medium itself, an exhibition at its best should serve as a form of contextualisation for art. In other words, an exhibition is curated to propose questions that leave viewers thinking and to keep it relevant to viewers. In order to find new ways to look at this collection, I proposed several questions during my curatorial process:

1. How should we make use of these wartime images in a more thoughtful and insightful way?
2. What can we learn from this collection?
3. How do we turn these images into meaningful narratives?

For this exhibition, I also proposed questions relating to the entanglement and strong relations between art and politics—can art be understood as a form of political discourse, or can art transcend the political?  It would be important and necessary to explore the use of art and the role of artists in time of conflicts, and further delve into the stories behind these wartime images and the feelings/experiences that those artist-soldiers wanted to convey.  War is still a recurring phenomenon in today’s international politics.  Therefore, the themes of this exhibition make “present” relevant as well.  We may gain insights into how past and present interact with one another by viewing these paintings and drawings as “dialectical images”—images of thought—that can be used for challenging viewers’ preconceptions and creating artistic dialogues of the time.

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This pieces combines direct content from Sung Yunwen and edited excerpts from her curatorial introduction to the exhibition.

Wartime Artists of Vietnam: Drawings and Posters from the Ambassador Dato’ N. Parameswaran Collection is now open and NUS Museum.