The (Calli)graphic Regimes of Contemporary Vietnamese Art
03 pm – 04:30 pm, Sat 08 Nov 2025
A. Farm Studio 5
6/4 Nguyễn Đăng Giai, An Khánh ward, HCMC
Language: English
Registration link (15 people)
Parking location: The Sentry P, 16 Nguyễn Đăng Giai, An Khánh ward
From the organizer:
A. Farm is excited to host. a reading and discussion with professor Pamela N. Corey’s essay “The (Calli)graphic Regimes of Contemporary Vietnamese Art”, which was originally published on Artmargins in 2024.
“In 1990s Hanoi, Vietnam, many contemporary artists navigated the written form as crucial to the logic of the pictorial field. These included Vũ Dân Tân (1946-2009), Trương Tân (b. 1963), and Nguyễn Văn Cường (b. 1973), among others. I examine these artistic experiments as integral to what many have hailed as the emergence of contemporary art in Vietnam, linked to the early effects of globalization and the impetus to freely engage with questions of selfhood following over forty years of a socialist realist mandate. However, I also suggest the significance of site to these practices, in particular the postsocialist graphic regime of the urban environment, with its traces of historical inscriptions, influx of commercial signage, and ubiquitous public propaganda posters that continue to coat the surfaces of cities today. The artworks discussed in this essay drove new understandings of art, particularly in the use of line and text to situate artistic expression as part of but also apart from the urban surfaces and graphic materials on and in which such unorthodox actions were enacted. As such, the (calli)graphic regime marked a radical shift in perceptions of what could be art in 1990s Vietnam.”
About guest speaker
Pamela N. Corey is an associate professor of art history in the Art and Media Studies program at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City. She researches and teaches modern and contemporary art history, focusing on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. Prior to joining Fulbright University Vietnam in 2021, she was an assistant professor in the History of Art & Archaeology department at SOAS University of London. She is the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021), guest co-editor of “Voice as Form,” a special issue of Oxford Art Journal (2020) and “On Modern and Contemporary Cambodian Art and Aesthetics,” a special issue of Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies (2014).
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