Can The Body Remember? Propaganda Images in Performance Art in Vietnam

“Can the body remember?” aims to be an open question and invites discussion about the impacts of propaganda images in the practice of contemporary performance artists in Vietnam. This question emerged from decades-long conversations I had with artists about their works. Examining the strategies leveraged by Lại Diệu Hà, Nguyễn Xuân Bắc, and Trần Lương, I show how these artists have turned government propaganda into a tool for criticism and reflection on their own collective memories in relation to state-sanctioned imagery. I also explore how the artists have turned propaganda images into a tool for criticism and reflection on their own collective memories with propaganda images. Published below is a portion of this longer project, focusing specifically on the third section on the work of Lại Diệu Hà.  Not included in this excerpt is an extended discussion of the performance work Lập Loè by the artist Trần Lương, in which the artist uses the symbolism of a red scarf to think generationally about the imprint of communist ideology on the body; as well as a section on the visual artworks of Ngô Xuân Bắc, whose artistic works are deeply engaged with the many facets of propaganda and its visuality in urban landscape. 

Lại Diệu Hà – The body remembers 

As one of the few female performance artists of her generation, Lại Diệu Hà, born in 1976, is known for her works that raise questions about gender and the role of women that is still shaped by patriarchy and Confucian concepts of virtue that overshadow how women are perceived in Vietnamese society. Often exposing her own body in her performance, ​​she plays with aspects of taboo​s, shame and discrimination associated with the female body, thereby also reflecting on her own experience. Nudity became essential for the artist to radicalize the female body, to break the Confucian framework of virtue and the Western dogma of beauty. It took her ten years to truly remove herself from the prescription of a female body in Vietnamese society. She, too, experienced the pressure of fulfilling beauty ideals of white smooth skin, black ebony hair and a curvaceous body perceived as ideal and feminine. The gaze of men had turned her to an object of desire—“Geisha like,” as she recalled—so much so that it was important for her to get rid of these features [rũ bỏ], to throw away this “gift” which for her was also poison. Seeing the body as a tool [cơ thể là dụng cụ], Hà instrumentalized her own body parts, translating them into equipments [đạo cụ trình diễn], which also meant to step out of her comfort zone of being adored and admired by male counterparts. Hà developed a series of “cut off performances” [cắt xẻo] in which she was naked on stage, and used knives and scissors to hurt her own body in front of the audience. According to Hà, a woman being naked on stage was something that shocked people. The performance caused her to be perceived as hysterical and mad [con dở hơi]. Paradoxically, the moment when she was on stage with this performance was also the moment when Hà “did not feel any pain.” To her, it was some sort of resistance against Confucianist notions of a woman within worship engaging in feminine chastity as part of domestic virtue—in other words, of being the gentle sex responding to male obsession. The intervention by and on her own body was a visual act to destroy this long-lasting understanding of women’s existence as being reserved for men. She was aware of the risk of turning her body and herself as and into an object under the male gaze, and after the performance series cut off, Hà took a break from the arts for a couple of years. According to her, she wanted to open doors, challenging the audience’s understanding of what performance was, but also be able to claim her own body. 

Hà is one of a few female performance artists who continuously works with her own definition of what performance is in the context of Vietnam—a medium that was ​​first introduced in the late 1990s by artists such as Trương Tân and Nguyễn Minh Thành, and then by Trần Lương in the early 2000s, remaining primarily dominated by male artists. In the context of Vietnam, a country that has been shaped by communist propaganda arts for decades, Hà strongly believes that in the northern part of the country, performance embodies propagandistic characters. Since the American war in Vietnam, propaganda culture has been constantly and rigidly produced by the Party’s cadre. In literature, music, and dance, certain propaganda images penetrated the body, and were reproduced through gesture. Hà retrospectively spoke about how she would often use her hand to gesticulate, raising her right hand in the air [vung lên]. Later on, she realized that this particular gesture is an image that is familiar to the people in Vietnam, and has been used frequently in propaganda posters. As the daughter of propaganda poster artist Lại Văn Thành, Hà grew up with these images. They were everywhere in their family house, as her father used to create the posters at home. Hà recalled watching him draw as she sometimes helped him color the motifs, and assisted him and his colleagues in distributing the posters in their district. As her father’s only child to become an artist, Hà strongly believes that her choice for the arts was deeply influenced by him. At the same time—and this is the most complex and interesting part of their relationship—she neglected him, and he abandoned his artistic career before passing away in 2010. It was her father’s death that prompted Hà to deeply engage with his work for the first time, resulting in Đọc về một tiểu sử  (2022) [Reading A Person’s Life], a performance that engaged their complex and contradictory relationship. 

In Đọc về một tiểu sử, Hà stood on stage and read out loud to the audience a text that she wrote about her father. She also invited the audience to read with her lines she had composed based on fragments of his diary. Reading with her, the voices of the audience overlapped with hers, creating a dissonance in rhythm and sound, constantly disrupted and intervened by words stuck in their throats. During the reading, the audience learned about Lại Văn Thành, a man who dedicated his entire life to propaganda arts—an occupation and a commitment to a genre that is largely understood as problematic amongst contemporary artists today. In the text, Hà weaved her own posthumous thoughts about her father with his self-reflection about how he started his career, the challenges he faced, and the shame he developed over the years for not being acknowledged as a true artist by his contemporaries. There were moments of humiliation that he went through by working for a communist apparatus that definitely wasn’t constructed on the common narrative of equality, solidarity, and brotherhood. Reading these lines, the audience became part of the performance, and they became complicit in his life path, moving with him through its obstacles and moments of shame.