From Hanoi to Paris: Vũ Cao Đàm’s Colonial Modernity and Transcultural Sentiments

After the 2024-2025 exhibition, Lê Phô, Mai-Thu, Vu Cao Dam Pionniers de l’art moderne vietnamien en France, a popular interest in modern Vietnamese art arose among the Parisian art scene, provoking interesting questions concerning the presentation and exhibition history concerning this genre. Focusing on the sculptures and life of painter-sculptor Vu Cao Dam (1908-2000), this paper expands on the limited research on the artist, and challenges the narrow perception of his work in Francophone and Anglophone contexts. Following the centennial of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (1925-1945), my project interrogates the centrality of colonial institutions in the career of Vu, placing his agency, as a colonized individual within colonial hegemony, at the forefront of the discussion. This new perspective allows us to reintroduce the possibility of colonial/cultural exchange in his work, as well as address the deeply lacking political and postcolonial analyses and interpretations of these works. Exhuming letters, documents, statues, photographs, and more from French, American, and Vietnamese archives and national collections, From Hanoi to Paris aims to reconsider the French empire from the aesthetic and ethnographic lens.