Blue Night, Red Earth: The Work of Nguyen Cam

sophisticated techniques and the rich bounty of natural resources that the land offers. During the French colonial period, the locus of art shifted with urbanization and the founding of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine in 1925, which introduced Western techniques of easel painting and life drawing.

After Vietnamese independence in 1945, and the relocation of the school in the hills of Viet Bac—the seat of the anti-colonial resistance movement— most artists invested their skills in realistic painting to craft patriotic images of the nation. This period coincided with Cam’s departure from Vietnam.

In the following decades, while his compatriots were fighting on the front lines or making art amidst the sound of falling artillery, Cam navigated his position as a refugee first in Laos, and then in Paris, where he was able to study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Away from Vietnam, he could turn to the land that he left behind as a source of creativity and tranform memories into subject matter.

Despite the inevitable pain of being uprooted, detachment from his country gave Cam tremendous freedom and allowed him to escape some of the constraints that were imposed on the artists who stayed behind. After 1954, artists in the North were subject to close monitoring for their patriotic activities and ideological leanings. Abstract art, for example, was forbidden until the economic opening, or Doi Moi, in 1990. Artists in the South, on the other hand, until reunification in 1975, had begun experimenting with modernist techniques of abstraction, which they also later had to abandon.

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