Signs and Signals from Vietnam: Essays on Contemporary Art

Just published! Edited by Pamela N. Corey, Nora A. Taylor, and Đỗ Tường Linh Over the past thirty years, contemporary art in Vietnam has emerged as a dynamic field shaped by memory, history, and experiment. Many Vietnamese artists now command international recognition, even as a growing domestic market for contemporary art fosters alternative infrastructures of collection and exhibition. Signs and Signals from Vietnam: Essays on Contemporary Art brings together artists, curators, and academics to examine the challenges shaping artistic practice and the writing of contemporary art histories in Vietnam today. Moving beyond familiar North-South or diasporic-national divides, the essays represent the perspectives of Vietnamese, Vietnamese diasporic, and non-Vietnamese writers of different generations, affiliations, and positionalities. Contributors trace the inventive ways artists work with language, narrative, performance, and archival practice to communicate through their art. Key themes running through the volume represent the predominant concerns of Vietnamese artists over the past three decades, including the enduring impact of socialist paradigms in contemporary art, gender, diaspora, memory, and the environment. Together, these essays demonstrate how contemporary art can convey lesser-known histories, contested narratives, and personal perspectives. This volume broadens and deepens the scope of global contemporary art while centring art practices in and from Vietnam. It introduces new ways of writing and thinking about art from Vietnam and beyond, and will be of interest to students and researchers of Southeast Asian and Vietnamese art, museum professionals and curators, educators, and those interested in contemporary art. "A compelling and essential guide to contemporary art in Vietnam, this collection combines breadth with intellectual clarity. It offers incisive perspectives on Vietnam’s place within global art histories and ecologies, while engaging thoughtfully with questions of form and medium. By bringing art criticism, visual history, and practitioner and curatorial approaches into dynamic conversation, it opens fresh, generative ways of understanding the field today." –Thy Phu, University of Toronto “Written with exceptional clarity, this incisive collection of essays illuminates the dynamic developments and historical paradigms that have shaped understandings of contemporary art in and from Vietnam. Signs and Signals from Vietnam advances multiplicity as method by bringing together a rich range of critical voices, positions, and approaches that collectively refute the harmful Western-centric frameworks that have long structured histories of contemporary art, and demand and demonstrate, instead, how Vietnamese contemporary art must be understood on its own terms.” –Peggy Wang, Bowdoin College “This promising volume captures the dynamism and complexity of Vietnamese contemporary art through the eyes of both pioneering scholars and the versatile practitioners actively shaping the field. It suggests that writing about Vietnamese art is, like its object, increasingly reflexive and multi-perspectival, no longer overshadowed by Cold War conflict; that its key contexts are not only national-political but also social, environmental and structural. The essays gathered here embrace close analysis of art works and critical commentary on Vietnam’s fast-developing scene, addressing salient themes and formal trajectories as well as organizational realities. Here is proof positive that on its new fronts, contemporary art history is being made close to the action, with equal parts immediacy and retrospection. Signs and Signals from Vietnam shows how keywords of art history—like ‘abstraction’, ‘socialist realism’ and even ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’—are not received categories but contestable terms, being redefined in diverse settings for a global discourse. The volume will be valued by those studying contemporary art across Southeast Asia and beyond, especially where independent actors have fostered its history in the absence of responsible institutions.” –David Teh, National University of Singapore Pamela N. Corey is Associate Professor of Art History at Fulbright University Vietnam and the author of The City in Time: Contemporary Art and Urban Form in Vietnam and Cambodia (2021). Nora A. Taylor is the Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art (2004 and 2009). Đỗ Tường Linh is a curator, art researcher, and writer based between Hanoi (Vietnam) and New York City (United States). Publication Year: 2026 296 pp, 229 x 152mm 82 colour images Paperback ISBN: 978-981-325-327-8