VI:Serve the Party, journalists/artists in VN told
Vietnam Insight
Enclosed are:
1. Vietnam Party Leader Warns Press to Toe the Line
2. The Art of War: Propaganda Artist - In Vietnam Reaches Wide Audience
VI:This article reminds me of an well-known poet - To^' Hu+~u -
whose rare talent has been submitted to serve the Vietnamese
Communist Party and communism. His undenyable talent helps to
magnify the communist enslaved mentality that shames any
Vietnamese who reads his poems; his beautiful verses paint such
distortion of the people as a Vietnamese babies' first word would
be "Stalin", not mommy or daddy; that Vietnamese' love for
Stalin is ten times the love they have for their parents,
children, spouses...
In Vietnam, talents have been forced to serve the party lines
instead of the common good, and have been curbed from
creativity...HOW SAD!
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Reuters
Saturday - 28-NOV-98
Vietnam Party Leader Warns Press to Toe the Line
HANOI, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Vietnam's Communist Party chief has
warned journalists to toe the party line and avoid negative and
sensational reporting, official media reported on Saturday.
"Being a true journalist it is necessary...to reflect the
thoughts and wishes of the public (and be) on the right political
track oriented by the party," the official Vietnam News Agency
quoted Le Kha Phieu as telling senior editors in Hanoi on Friday.
Phieu said that during the country's decade-old reform policy
known as doi moi, or economic restructuring, Vietnamese society
faced increasingly complicated challenges.
He warned that some reporters had distanced themselves from life
to concentrate on doom and gloom.
"Some press activists separate themselves from life to give
themselves the right to lecture, apportion blame and look at life
as black," Phieu said.
"(The result is) no achievements, very few good people, no good
works and looking just to see negative issues."
Phieu also warned of creeping commercialisation of the press
where sensationalised stories were printed to help boost
circulation.
Vietnam's media has boomed in recent years, but there are no
private titles and all publishing has to be licensed by the
Culture and Information Ministry.
There is no official state censor but editors are personally
responsible for ensuring politically correct and acceptable
material.
In a recent case a prominent newspaper editor was detained for
over a year for writing a series of articles that alleged
high-level fraud in the purchase of a number of patrol boats.
Phieu said true revolutionary journalists would be able to
attract readers, increase circulation and at the same time
highlight social responsibility.
"The citizen's duty requires the journalist to fight without
compromise the dark plots and wrongful ideas of the hostile
forces to protect the point of view of the party (and) policies
and laws of the state," he said.
Phieu did not specify who or what the hostile forces were
--------------------------------
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Friday - November 27, 1998
The Art of War: Propaganda Artist - In Vietnam Reaches Wide Audience
By SAMANTHA MARSHALL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Hanoi, Vietnam -- Squatting on the floor of his spartan family
home on the outskirts of Hanoi's old quarter, artist Tran Mai
spreads his life's work across the linoleum.
"Remember your hatred of the Americans," reads one poster from
1972, showing a grieving young girl in a bombed-out street.
Another portrays a peasant couple standing over the wreckage of a
B-52 bomber, their fists punching a bright yellow sky.
Then there's his more recent oeuvre: "For the process of
industrialization and modernization," exhorts the 1994 propaganda
poster. Above the blocky Communist-style text, it portrays a
young man in a suit, standing in a construction site, clutching a
mobile phone.
The portfolio of Mr. Mai -- for 30 years one of Vietnam's top
propaganda artists -- reflects the dramatic social and political
changes in Vietnam's recent history. From the simple fighting
words of the Vietnam War to the vague economic messages of a
Communist government attempting modernization and reform, he has
spent the past three decades delivering the government's message
with bold images and bright colors, hung on streetside placards,
monuments and government buildings.
'For the People'
"I'm more than just an artist, because what I do is for the
people," says the grandfatherly painter.
It wasn't exactly the career that Mr. Mai envisioned for himself
when he was studying French Impressionism at Hanoi's prestigious
Ecole des Beaux Arts in the early 1960s. Coming from Hanoi's
educated middle class, Mr. Mai managed to avoid joining the
anti-French, and later anti-American, resistance army. Instead of
fighting, he made a comfortable living painting commissioned
portraits of Vietnam's Communist elite from the modest five-room
house he has inhabited since 1950. But in 1968, at the height of
the Vietnam War, the government assigned Mr. Mai his new career,
propaganda artist.
While the B-52 bombs dropped on Vietnam's northern capital, it
was Mr. Mai's job to stay in the city and paint posters to
bolster the spirits of soldiers and a population under siege.
Then 29, Mr. Mai spent the rest of the war alone while his wife
and children, along with most other Hanoi residents, took refuge
in the countryside.
For the next eight years he lived and worked alone, often without
electricity or food. Candles lit the dark room in his home that
still serves as his studio, while distant shelling grew closer.
Haunting Scene
His house, now strewn with pots of Chinese acrylic paints and his
grandchildren's toys, escaped the bombs. But in one of his forays
into town in search of inspiration he came across a scene that
still haunts him. A B-52 fell on Ham Tien Street in 1972, gutting
homes and killing the hundreds of residents too poor to flee to
the safety of the provinces. Among the death and debris Mr. Mai
vividly remembers a little girl in a white mourning dress weeping
over her mother's mutilated corpse.
The scene inspired one of many anti-American posters, but the
horror of it left him numb, "like a machine," he says. "I forgot
to eat or sleep. ... All that mattered was to help to fight the
war with my paintbrush."
It's a fervor that Mr. Mai says he hasn't recaptured in his
poster painting since. The war propaganda "came from my heart,"
he says. Unlike today, the government was too busy fighting the
war to tell him what to paint. "So I had to struggle with my
imagination."
His war period has also become his most collectible. U.S. and
French diplomats have been snapping up dozens of posters, mostly
from before 1975, for between $80 and $100 apiece.
High Praise From the Party
The government pays Mr. Mai two million dong to three million
dong ($144 to $216) for each propaganda painting. The high praise
he receives from senior Communist Party officials stands him in
good stead for more lucrative logo and poster painting
assignments from state-owned enterprises, which generally pay 10
million dong per job.
Mr. Mai, a devout member of the Communist Party, has sold so much
of his propaganda art to foreign visitors that he doesn't have
enough to put together an exhibition he's been planning for
months.
Much of what is left is being grabbed by Vietnamese government
officials, to whom Mr. Mai must give posters as "gifts." But
prices aren't rising as the originals become more rare, Mr. Mai
says. The artist is so flattered by the interest of the
foreigners who drop by his tiny house that he doesn't have the
heart to charge more. Anyone who takes the trouble to find the
obscure passageway that leads to his home -- sandwiched between a
video store and a shop that sells mannequin torsos -- is treated
to a cup of jasmine tea and a story for every poster that's a
potential sale. "Everyone wants to buy a piece of history," he
explains.
Mixed Reactions
One U.S. Embassy official, a Vietnam War veteran, was so moved by
the anti- American painting of the young girl in mourning that he
burst into tears, Mr. Mai recalls. "It made me very proud," he
says, though the American, who worked in the embassy's
information department, didn't buy the poster.
The artist is more puzzled by a French woman's recent interest in
a portrait from 1972 of a grinning Richard Nixon with rocket
teeth. "It's so ugly," he says. She bought the poster.
Mr. Mai would have chosen one of his more recent works, a 1995
portrait to commemorate the 105th-birthday anniversary of Ho Chi
Minh, the founder of Vietnamese communism, and "one of my best
efforts," he says. The portrait shows an elderly "Uncle Ho" in
brown monotone against the Vietnamese flag -- a yellow star
against a red background.
Source of Inspiration
Ho Chi Minh's poems inspire several of Mr. Mai's posters. One
from 1968, of a Vietnamese man and woman marching along the Ho
Chi Minh trail, bears the quotation, "Go ahead, go ahead,
soldiers and people, north and south unite for a prettier
spring." But Uncle Ho isn't the only Communist patriarch to serve
as Mr. Mai's muse. The artist holds up a portrait of Cuban leader
Fidel Castro, which he says, "I painted for myself." Mr. Castro's
slogan, "country or death," reminded him of Ho Chi Minh's saying,
"nothing is more precious than freedom and independence."
To the layman, his work carries the trademark look of socialist
realism -- characterized loosely by beefy peasants marching and
thrusting upward toward a red dawn, with their flags and hairdos
billowing in the fresh breeze. But the smooth-faced 60-year-old
bristles at the comparison, despite a wall of certificates and
awards from art schools and Communist Party committees in the
former Soviet Union, Poland, Cuba and North Korea.
"My style is very Vietnamese, [with] no influence at all from
foreign styles," he insists, gesturing to one of his pictures to
hammer home the point -- a simple design of a fist clutching an
AK-47 in red monotone.
Uniquely Vietnamese Touches
To be sure, there are some uniquely Vietnamese touches to Mr.
Mai's work. A sheaf of rice sprouts from the broken tail of a
crashed U.S. Air Force plane in a poster designed to encourage
farmers to grow more rice for the war effort. A young woman drags
the tail of another American war plane across a deserted beach
above the artist's favorite line from a famous Vietnamese poem:
"Our sea is not their lake." The poem, combined with the image of
a Vietnamese woman struggling in a barren landscape, eloquently
illustrates Vietnam's lonely struggle against centuries of
imperialism, he says.
There's less room for creativity these days. Now the government
dictates every detail of its complicated missive. "They want so
much in the picture."
Still, Mr. Mai thinks his contemporaries could benefit from a bit
more discipline. "Most Vietnamese art is very individualistic and
not very good," he says. On the damp walls of his tiny living
room hang amateurish paintings of flowers, Vietnamese women
dressed in ao dais and Mekong Delta water colors, all in various
experimental styles, and all by Mr. Mai.
Pride in His Work
Later, on a stroll around Hanoi, he stops outside the Cultural
Palace, where a national trade-union congress is in session with
Vietnam's top leaders. Mr. Mai points out his technicolor poster
splashed across the entrance -- an intellectual, a factory worker
and a peasant woman are profiled against a crowded
robin's-egg-blue background of the oil refineries, power plants,
steel and telecommunications plants the government would like to
have. Standing in front of his work, Mr. Mai begins to complain
that he wasn't allowed to paint the whole poster in his favorite
color, red -- when, suddenly, a policeman appears over the top of
the giant banner and waves for Mr. Mai to move on.
Still, he takes pride in his work, even if the design isn't
entirely his own. A similar Labor Congress poster painted by a
rival covers a billboard across the street from Mr. Mai's home.
"You can tell it's by an amateur," he sneers, though he's vague
about the differences in style.
But as they negotiate Hanoi's chaotic traffic by motorbike,
passersby don't even glance at the images that decorate nearly
every major intersection and public square in the city. "These
posters just don't move people the way they used to," Mr. Mai
says.
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