vietnam through my eyes
I present you the art collection I did as a supplement for college application back in 2022. I never had an occassion to post one, but as I was starting my vietnam blog series I might as well put it here. hope you find it interesting.
ideas I had in this collection come from rereading (mostly skimming) old vietnamese textbooks from grade 1 to 12 after the newer textbooks were introduced in 2020, which left out a lot of details that only old textbooks had. it's been largely simplified to be less propaganda based, but there's still a haunting beauty that only old textbooks can offer. the new textbook reads like the aftermath of globalization and cultural dilution.
I have a more critical look at vietnam after a spending few semesters abroad and experiencing reverse culture shock. the more we talk about something, the more it evolves to be more of an idea and a concept. the vietnam I know about is not the vietnam my parents or grandparents knew about, nor it is the same thing that my peers from at home, from abroad, or what overseas vietnamese think of, and definitely not the same vietnam that got portrayed for the american gaze in zemeckis' forrest gump or wes anderson's rushmore. depending on the side of history that you sided which, or whether you sided at all, your experience is a crystallization of many different factors, especially many years of family history down the line that shape who you are who you are, where you live, how you get treated and how you treat the world.
I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'm just here to show you what I see and what it could be and could have been. a reel that I watched a long time ago remarked how a lot of vietnamese people that left in the 70s or 80s they brought with them a vietnam of a certain time period of a certain decade [that doesn’t exist anymore]. I think lots of art is done to reconstruct what is lost to time in our collective conscious.
at the end of the day, I go back to this now just for the fun of it. it's still interesting to reread these and see what my high school self thought about vietnam as a country. like a before and after kind of thing.
photo credits (chronologically)
world photography organization
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