Chương-Đài VÕChercheuse invitée

Septembre - octobre 2020

Chương-Đài Võ is a Researcher at Asia Art Archive. Her writing on modern and contemporary art in Southeast Asia can be found in publications such as Afterall, Sismographie des luttes, the exhibition catalogue Southern Constellations: The Poetics of the Non-Aligned, and Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s Modern Art. Recent curatorial projects include Form Colour Action: Sketchbooks and Notebooks of Lee Wen, and Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia, Vol. 1: G for Ghost(writers). Her research has been supported by Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Mellon Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, Fulbright Program, University of California Pacific Rim Research Program, and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. She is researching the construction of modernisms in Vietnam, 1925-1975.

Selected Bibliography

• “Le réalisme socialiste d’Hanoï et l’internationalisme de Saigon au prisme de Giai Phẩm, Nhân Văn et Sáng Tạo, de 1956 à 1961,” Sismographie des luttes, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 2020.
  
  
• “Spirits of Resistance: Asia in the 1950s to 1990s.” Southern Constellations: Poetics of the Non-Aligned. Ljubljana: MG+MSUM, 2019, 25-31.
• “Line Form Colour Action.” Afterall, No. 46 (Autumn/Winter 2018): 14-25.
• “The Ground Underneath: On Ho Tzu Nyen’s The Nameless.” Ideas, Asia Art Archive. 16 Oct 2017. https://aaa.org.hk/en/ideas/ideas/the-ground-underneath-on-ho-tzu-nyens-the-nameless.
• “This Side of Now.” Asian American Literary Review: (Re)Collecting the Vietnam War 6: 2 (Fall 2015): 59-120.
• “An archive of displacement.” Modern Art 174 (September 2014): 62-71.
• “When Memories Collide: Revisiting War in Vietnam and the Diaspora.” Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention. Eds. David Lim and Hiroyuki Yamamoto. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. 73-92.
• “Memories That Bind: Đặng Thùy Trâm’s Diaries as Agent of Reconciliation.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3: 2 (Summer 2008): 196-207.
• “Vietnamese Cinema in the Era of Market Liberalization.” Political Regimes and the Media in Asia: Continuities, Contradictions and Change. Eds. Krishna Sen and Terence Lee. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. 70-84.

Projet

This project will focus on what I call “Saigon Internationalism” during the Republic of Vietnam era (1954-1975). Most art histories of modernism in Vietnam focus on the genealogy established in Hanoi, and there is little research on what developed in Saigon. One important source is the periodical, which served as an essential platform for the propagation, formation and circulation of ideas and practices about the modern. Saigon was home to more than 40 daily newspapers, 1000 printing houses, and 150 publishing houses. Many artists wrote essays, short stories and art reviews, and created drawings and paintings specifically for periodicals. I will approach them as both primary and secondary sources as well as consult art and archival collections in Paris, Lyon and Aix-en-Provence.