Lecture Thao Nguyen Phan
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December 2021
The lecture “Contemporary Art’s Histories in Vietnam: A Southern Perspective” by Professor Pamela Nguyen Corey kicks off a series of public and educational programs in association with the Nguyen Art Foundation’s inaugural exhibition ‘People, Victory and Life after the War’.
The lecture provides a broad overview of developments in Ho Chi Minh City that were significant in the shaping of infrastructures, discourses, and practices of art that were considered distinctively “contemporary” in the late 1990s and more prominently in the first decade of the new millennium. This regional account includes the community of abstract painters that were often exhibited as the Group of 10, the programming of Blue Space Contemporary Arts Center, the initiatives and collaborations undertaken by returnee diasporic artists with local artists, and the ambitious exhibition project Saigon Open City. These activities contributed to the distinctive profile of Ho Chi Minh City not only as an artistic center within Vietnam (positioned alongside Hanoi), but also as a regional and global hub in the map of the contemporary art world.
Pamela Nguyen Corey researches and teaches modern and contemporary art history, focusing on Southeast Asia within broader transnational Asian and global contexts. She received her BA (Studio Art) from the University of California, Irvine, and her Ph.D. (History of Art and Visual Studies) from Cornell University. Prior to joining Fulbright University Vietnam in January 2021, she was an assistant professor in the History of Art & Archaeology department at SOAS University of London.
Pamela has published in numerous academic journals, exhibition catalogs, and platforms for artistic and cultural commentary. She is the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (University of Washington Press, 2021), and co-editor of “Voice as Form,” a special issue of Oxford Art Journal (2020). She is currently involved in various editorial and writing projects on the topics of global modernism, contemporary art in Vietnam, and decolonizing art history.
For more information about our exhibition ‘People, Victory and Life after the War’, please visit: https://nguyenartfoundation.com/People-Victory-and-Life-after-the-War