KERRY NGUYEN-LONG
DECADES AGO, I came across an intriguing black and white woodblock image in the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum, but it would be many years before I finally met Phung Pham, a quiet, intense man with an overwhelming need for creative expression. He is now in his ninetieth year. This article is largely based on interviews held in 2006 at his family residence in Hanoi, Vietnam, supplemented by information from public interviews of the artist at recent exhibitions. The works illustrated were either photographed at the artist’s residence or are from collectors, who purchased directly from the artist. Others are from a 2023 retrospective of the artist’s work exhibited at Thang Long Art Gallery in Hanoi.
Phung Pham’s peripatetic early years were not unusual for the times in which he grew up, but they seem to have contributed considerably to the making of a man of deep and sensitive complexity. Born in 1934 into a wealthy family, he was the fifth of nine children to Phung Van Kinh and Dang Thi Thanh in Yen Lac district, Vinh Yen (now Vinh Phuc) province (1). Pham lived with an aunt while attending four years of primary school in Son Tay, but revolution erupted in 1943–1944, and with the Japanese star fading by 1945, the Viet Minh arrived in his village. The young boy watched and joined the demonstrations. Then fighting broke out from Hanoi to Viet Tri and the French started to attack the Viet Minh. Phung Pham joined the Department of Information in Vinh Yen province and was involved in writing wall slogans, such as: “We Must Win”, “The Enemy Must Lose”, “The Long War Must Succeed”. It was a time of great energy and vitality.
In 1947, aged thirteen, Pham went to the resistance base in Viet Bac (north of Hanoi), and over the next five years moved around the five provinces working variously in support of the resistance. In 1951, he was sent to Guilin in southern China to study teaching at one of several schools then attended by thousands of Vietnamese students. There he met Nguyen Khang (1916–1989), the artist and teacher, and it was through this personal encounter that Pham came to the realisation he wanted to be an artist. He returned to Hanoi when it was liberated in 1954 and worked for the Department of Culture in Hai Duong province, teaching month-long courses in graphics, mainly for cadres from local communes and districts. In his free time, he worked on murals, although constrained by a dire shortage of art materials. “Those days are like a legend. They don’t exist anymore”, he recalled.
In 1955–1956, employment took him to Ha Tay province, teaching graphic art as part of the education reform programme, but in his free time he bundled up his artworks and pedalled to Hanoi to show them to the artists, Sy Ngoc (1919–1990) and Diep Minh Chau (1919–circa 2003), both teaching at the newly reopened art school in Hanoi. Pham was anxious to know how his own paintings measured against those of their students. He states that Nguyen Phan Chanh (1892–1984), Tran Van Can (1910–1994) and Thang Tran Phenh (1895–?) were all early artistic influences. However, his knowledge of graphic arts had a strong influence while his later encounter with cubism also struck a chord, and it is the combination of these influences that has brought great vitality to his work. Yet, there is also a Japanese influence evident in the depiction of certain facial features and hairstyles. Interestingly, influence of social realism is confined to depictions of the country’s workers, as described below. Pham says his aim has been to create works that are easily understood and visually impactful. Poetic, curvaceous lines and ephemeral soft colours are anathema to him.
It took almost ten years before Pham had an opportunity to study art formally when, in 1968, he enrolled at Hanoi University of Fine Arts to study a four-year Fine Arts degree. The course consisted of two years of general study, followed by two years’ specialisation. By this time, party discipline and personal background were established as matters of state interest, and creativity was limited within the official framework. However, 1968 was also the year the United States began its bombing campaign of the north, necessitating the evacuation of Hanoi. “Rarely have students suffered as in that period”, noted Pham. Classes were held in Thai Nguyen province and Pham successfully completed the two years of general study there.
He was eagerly preparing to embark on the last two years of his studies when his world was suddenly turned upside down. His education ended; there would be no specialisation and no graduation. Pham is reluctant to discuss this period, but his desire to become an artist never wavered. He returned to Hanoi and found employment at the Film Animation Centre where he remained for ten years, and some of his creations still survive. Reminiscing on his life at that time he explained: “… life moved around a bowl of rice, and one simply had to suffer it”. He was thirty-six, unmarried and without prospects.
Pham went through a period of deep introspection and, at the same time, experienced a profound surge in creative energy, but without the means to express it. Yet, his creative spirit survived, and its delayed expression spawned an intense molten creativity exploring often complex subjects, some of which bordered on the taboo. His themes focus on women, physical love, war and its consequences, social issues, with a particular concern for those involved in physical labour, but never forgetting his early impressionable years lived among ethnic minorities. Alongside these subjects he ventured into personal interpretations of myths and legends.
In 1971, Pham married Nguyen Thi Hao, and, the same year, he made his first woodblock, Nuoc bac com vang (Today Silver Water, Tomorrow Golden Rice). Marriage assuaged emotional pain, but brought practical difficulties. He now had a wife, and soon two small sons. “War is a most difficult time … to have children.” When he returned home from work, it was time for his wife to go to work, and time for him to look after the children. “Where was time to paint?”
In these early years, Pham worked in woodblock, a traditional local medium, its materials readily available and affordable. In the next decades he produced a series of poignant and poetic works, and his creativity surged. In the portrait of Phan Boi Chau, the bearded bespectacled patriot looks out from an empty black background. Opposite the image of Phan Boi Chau a taut rope is suspended, its tensility indicative of the tensions then rife in the country (2). This simple device conveys the message with a stunning economy of imagery.
His skilled draughtsmanship is evident in his use of space, the employment of strong lines, extensive patterning and the use of contrasts. He reserves black and white for woodblock prints, which he says is in his blood, as seen in the Phan Boi Chau woodblock and in Spring Garden (13). Later, when he worked in lacquer, he exploited the impact of the colours, favouring warm reds and yellows against dark colours though sometimes also combining colour with black and white (11). Alongside his accomplished black and whites (2–6, 9, 12, 13), Pham’s facility with colour is unquestioningly engaging (7, 8). Subsequently, as in a 2013 lacquer work titled Chai toc (Combing Hair), there is an emboldened use of colour: against a blindingly red background modesty cast aside is depicted on a wooden chair in a smouldering dark green touched with gold (10). It is this judicious use of a limited colour palette that imbues Pham’s compositions with a singular vigour and freshness (10, 11, 14–19); consider the poke of red on the lips (10, 14, 15).
Again and again, he marinates a theme in his creative juices. The hair-washing theme features in Que moi (New Homeland). This woodblock, not illustrated, shows a village in moonlight. Behind houses and a bamboo fence, standing at some distance in the shadows but caught in the moonlight, a naked woman bends over a basin washing her long hair besides a stoneware water jar—an incidental presence occupying only the right-hand corner of the composition. However, in Ben sau buc rem (Behind the Screen) (3) and another titled Goi dau (Washing Hair), the latter with decidedly Japanese influence, the woman’s figure commands all the space on the woodblock, the surrounds enriched with strong linear detail. This subject would later be reworked in lacquer in black and gold, also under the title, Goi dau (Washing Hair).
Pham’s strengths are all on view in his work featuring city girls. There is a riot of textures and patterns in a rich decorative vocabulary that extends across clothing, tabletops, tablecloths, vases, blinds and chairs. Wearing ao dai or fashionable pants and blouse, upswept hair, or chic-cut short styles, and with long slender hands and manicured nails, these girls dominate. They sit on high-backed chairs, they ponder, they fuss, they dry and comb their hair. With self-conscious poise, they lean across a table, arrange a lily in a vase. They flaunt themselves, sometimes most provocatively (5–8). In Trang diem (Make-up), against a black background, a coquettish fashionista flirts at her image in a hand-held mirror (5). When asked about the remarkable bevy of women portrayed, Pham states that fantasy is his model rather than any actual woman, but if they are fantasy some bear an uncanny resemblance to his wife, in both stature and profile. He says he particularly enjoys working on this theme and it might be said it is the only theme of his mature years that dallies on the gentler side of life.
The woodblock titled Tu hao (Proud) depicts a Thai hill tribe woman with the same demeanour and manicured hands as a city girl. This is an unusual depiction in that Vietnamese artists usually paint ethnic minority girls in their cultural contexts, and although in this work Pham, like others before him, draws on the indelible memory of years lived in the north-west among different ethnic minorities, this unique depiction is plucked straight out of his fertile imagination (9).
It was not until the early 1990s that family circumstances made it possible for him to turn to lacquer and for that he employed a craftsman-teacher. Such was his progress that he was soon working in parallel in woodblock and lacquer and, from 2003, he added son khac (coromandel), working in all three mediums simultaneously. The carving employed in woodblock and in coromandel lacquer have some affinity although much more detail can be worked into woodblock. Coromandel is more difficult to work with, as it is a much harder material to carve than the grained wood of a woodblock. Furthermore, the layers of lacquer need to be sufficiently thick so that the hardened lacquer can be carved without cutting through to the support. There is also an ever-present danger that the lacquer might split so much care is required. The area carved away is then coloured using acrylics, as in Ben hoa hue (Beside the Lilies) (8).
Chong han (Fighting Against Drought), painted in 1990, is among Pham’s earlier lacquer paintings, and in that same year, it was awarded a gold medal at the National Fine Arts Exhibition (19). The women’s hats, coloured with eggshell, glow against the dark background. Pham has since put eggshell aside, preferring…
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