On Difficulties: The Postwar Vietnamese Art Historian in the Face of Ethnography

This essay aims to reexamine the current state of Vietnamese contemporary art history from a methodological standpoint. By first identifying the “ethnographic turn” in Vietnamese contemporary art history, it argues that the formalization of ethnographic methods has enabled a condition that not only privileges epistemological efficiency but also perpetuates an intellectual disadvantage for emerging researchers of the postwar generations. By providing accounts of the author’s firsthand experience, it also identifies a number of masterful structures and practices that could be responsible for this disadvantage.