CITY
ON THE RISE
HANOI,
VIETNAM
By Alison Lapp
Consummate art aficionados stopped to consider
4- to 30-second minimalist video clips at this city’s
recent exhibition of Tempography, an art form intended
to capture glimpses of easily overlooked moments in everyday
life. The pieces, depicting silent moving images of glass
shattering or reflections on water, could have been part
of the latest chic opening in one of the world’s
top art capitals. Instead of Paris, New York, or Berlin,
however, the curators of this cutting edge contemporary
art project looked further east to Hanoi, Vietnam.
The bustling streets of Vietnam’s
capital often come as a surprise to Westerners whose
imaginings of the nation stop with the 1975 pictures
of helicopters being thrown off aircraft carriers during
the hasty scramble to flee the country after the fall
of Saigon. Instead of war-ravaged ruins, visitors to
Hanoi today find a lively mix of traditional and modern.
Street vendors in conical hats hawk their mangosteens
and papayas in front of a local fashionista’s newly
opened boutique. Instead of broken-down rickshaws, the
predominantly young populace zips around on the lightweight
motorbikes that define the frantic pace of the metropolis’
tree-lined, but often narrow and twisting, boulevards.
Instead of bitterness about the 16-year war waged against
them, the Vietnamese welcome Americans on tour in Hanoi,
and are more interested in learning about the newest
Western gadgets than rehashing the past.
It is through that singular ability
to leave behind a centuries-long history of subjugation
(at the hands of Chinese conquerors, French colonialists,
and as a proxy battlefield in America’s Cold War
with Russia) that Vietnam has been able to enter the
21st century as a rapidly developing economy with a
GDP that has grown about eight percent annually for
the past five years. The Vietnamese people’s capacity
to forgive and, above all, to move on, could serve as
a lesson to so many of the world’s nations mired
in conflicts handed down through the generations. That
spirit of choosing the possibilities of the future over
the tragedies of the past is exemplified best by Hanoi’s
nascent art scene, where young artists are beginning
to experiment with media that were unavailable to their
poor and heavily regulated forebears.
Before hitting the galleries, weary travelers need a
place to drop their bags. There is no more splendid
place to do so than at the Sofitel Metropole Hanoi,
a throwback to the days of the French bourgeoisie’s
privileged lifestyle. The magnificent pillared building
is a stone’s throw from the still active European-style
Hanoi Opera House and offers a decadent chocolate brunch.
For a more modern brand of luxury, stop
into the Hanoi Daewoo Hotel, a popular resting
spot for East Asia’s business elite. Set outside
the main tourist center, the hotel offers the chance
to experience Hanoi in a less frequented but more authentic
neighborhood.
Local gentry tend to reside in the West
Lake neighborhood, and it is no surprise that one of
the city’s most blissfully isolated resorts, Thang
Loi Hotel, is located there as well. The interior
tropical garden reminds visitors of the Vietnamese wilderness
outside the city, while the poolside bar calls to mind
the height of civilization.
Meanwhile, for the budget-minded, Hanoi
Elegance Hotel provides the personalized attention
of a boutique hotel at, thankfully, developing world
prices.
Value for your money is readily found
in Hanoi, a city that is easy on the pocketbook. That
principle is at its most appetizing in the city’s
ubiquitous street stalls, where locals gather over shockingly
bitter tea and perch on miniature stools while enjoying
a bowl of noodle soup, a skewer of smoky grilled fish,
or any of Vietnam’s other delightful street treats.
Vietnamese food is tangy but not cloying,
flavorful but not spicy, and always accompanied by platefuls
of fresh herbs. As there is rarely a walkway not scented
with the salty aroma of dried squid, a favorite snack,
or lined with vendors hawking green mangoes newly dusted
with chili, the best place to start any food adventure
is on the street. One of Hanoi’s signature dishes,
bun cha, a mouth-watering mix of sweet and savory, can
best be sampled there. Also, make sure to try the barbeque
pork and rice vermicelli in a piquant broth that is
available throughout the city, but is particularly delectable
at the restaurants that start at 140 Ngoc Khanh Street.
Diners who want the scrumptiousness
of Hanoi street fare without folding themselves into
tiny plastic stools on the sidewalk might appreciate
Quan An Ngon, an eatery that serves a full array
of street specialties in a striking canopied courtyard.
The restaurant is one of the few places in the city
that offers the southern dish banh xeo, a crispy, turmeric-infused
pancake filled with an always fresh tasting mash of
shrimp, sprouts, and greens.
Harkening back to an older era, Hoa
Sua Restaurant d’Application serves beautifully
plated Vietnamese classics in a French colonial manor.
Guests can succumb to the temptation to order a full,
three-course meal knowing that the restaurant serves
as a training ground for underprivileged street kids
and gives them a chance to learn a vocation.
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Another staple of Hanoi life is rounding up friends for
bia hoi, or fresh, light, Pilsner-style beer. Because
it lacks preservatives, the contents of a tapped keg must
be sold within a day, leading to thirst-inspiring prices
from 30–60 cents a glass. The best place to drink
in this culture, with a serving of home cooking Vietnam-style,
is Chung Den Bia Hoi, rumored to have the best
banana flower salad in town. To make it, the expert chefs
chop the foot-long, purple banana bud into impossibly
thin slices, toss with local vegetables, and top with
roasted peanuts and a vinegary dressing for a dish that
packs an exotic crunch in every mouthful.
Thus rested and sated, visitors are
ready to explore. In a city that is still defining itself,
where an entire block’s worth of buildings can
transform in the space of a month. It is not surprising
that art takes varied and seemingly disjointed forms.
A walk down Hang Bong, a main entry into Hanoi’s
vibrant Old Quarter, takes pedestrians past a number
of art shops displaying acrylic representations of life
in the countryside in an adapted impressionist style.
Of particular note is Mai Gallery, the first
private gallery to open after the 1986 open market reforms
that brought private ownership to Vietnam. Further along
the street, Apricot Gallery and Gia Huy Gallery
are worth a stop for their emphasis on minimalist art.
Spend too much time on this or other main tourist thoroughfares,
and the abundant paintings will start to repeat, with
the same works seen in storefront after storefront.
Those shops, aimed mainly at foreigners who lack the
time to fully browse the city’s offerings, only
scratch the surface of the art world Hanoi has to offer.
The photographers, videographers, and
performance artists found upon a closer look into Hanoi’s
art landscape, are very much a new phenomena. They emerged
from a scene where the right to create art was available
solely to those born into artist guild families, and
the only customer was the government.
“Artists who sketched soldiers
or war scenes were automatically elevated. There was
no aesthetic judgment at all,” Dr. Nora A. Taylor,
a Vietnamese art expert at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago, said of pre-reform Vietnam.
In 2000, the world took note of the
newly-open Vietnam. An influx of international buyers
triggered a swing to the other extreme, and private
art spaces sprang up rapidly to vie for suddenly available
cash. The increased pressure to produce led to extensive
copying and price fluctuation in the art market, Taylor
said.
Hanoi’s contemporary arts culture
began as backlash against the rapid commercialization
of art. In search of art that is, by definition, non-saleable,
artists turned to forms like installation, performance,
and video arts. The movement, which Taylor described
as driven by the “primary goal just to be an artist,
not tied to the constraints of the market or marketability,”
spurred the rise of independent, artist-run spaces where
the art on display is often not for sale, but where
the experience of visiting is priceless.
In 2008, the oldest of those spaces,
Nha San Duc, celebrated ten years of providing
a secluded exhibition hall in a traditional, ethnic
minority stilt house converted for this more contemporary
use. Another, Ryllega, the name formed by rearranging
the letters in the word “gallery,” moves from
space to space throughout Hanoi’s outer neighborhoods,
thus making its shows more accessible to the city’s
less art-savvy audiences. It is open only when hosting
a show, but its activities can be followed at http://www.hanoigrapevine.com,
a site that chronicles the city’s arts activity.
Those interested in a more traditional
gallery experience should not lose heart, Hanoi has
been growing in that direction as well. With The
Bui Gallery, Betty Bui, a French-born and American-educated
daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, brought the third
gallery run by international standards to the city last
year.
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