“Sandales modernes de fantaisie,” Plate 8, Volume 2, Monographie Dessinée de l’Indochine.
In 1935 in conjunction with a publishing house in Paris, the Vietnamese students of the École d’Art de Gia-Định in southern Vietnam and its French director Jules Besson released a sumptuous illustrated folio entitled Monographie Dessinée de l’Indochine intended to provide readers in Europe with a “slice of life” in the distant exotic colony. The group of Vietnamese artists and printmakers that jointly contributed to the collection of 240 plates in the volume, though, made no attempts to conceal individual hands or stylistic preferences, leading to a heterogeneity that is sometimes jarring as readers encounter both Western ethnographic prints and images influenced by both Asian and European modernism. This paper explores the potent ways that the Monographie prompts the consideration of the descriptive and mutable potential of artistic style in a colonial context. Artists trained at French-founded technical arts schools in Vietnam in the first half of the twentieth century were exposed to a variety of artistic traditions — Chinese,
“Bijoux: bagues ( cà rá), bracelets (chiếc vàng), tour de cou ( giây chuyền), broche (bông cổ), boucles d’oreilles (bông tai) ,” Plate 10, Volume 2, Monographie Dessinée de l’Indochine.
Japanese, French, and traditional Vietnamese — with the goal of fostering a uniquely Vietnamese style. The end result, though, was a jumbled body of work that scholars have readily written off as derivative colonial pastiche. However, I argue, that the Monographie‘s variety also suggests importance of the multiplicity of the modern, as Vietnamese artists actively borrowed, molded, and transformed artistic forms as a means of their own self-representation.