His first solo show opened in Hanoi in 1994, displaying an abundance of male nudes. ‘Touched by an angel’ | Image courtesy: Thavibu Art Gallery In contrast, many of his later paintings show cavorting, loving and playful same-sex couples. It is striking that Tan’s first queer artwork represents brutal domination. More directly, Circus shows a figure that appears to be powerful, controlling and abusive, and one that is twisted, inverted and powerless. Ropes are a recurrent image in Truong Tan’s artworks, symbolising his feelings about Vietnam’s conservative environment. Circus, in fact, references restrictions in the bound-up ankles of one figure. It wasn’t easy, and for some time he kept his homoerotic drawings private.
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“My goal was set,” he said, explaining that he was ready to stop hiding his homosexuality and that he was determined to forge a career as a professional artist. The decision to show this work activated something in him. Photograph taken by Truong Tan and reproduced with permission. The painting Circus was exhibited in 1992.
Truong Tan’s first work showing homosexual content dates from 1992, when the painting Circus was displayed in a group show at the Hanoi Fine Arts University, where Tan was a lecturer. Truong Tan’s artwork | Image courtesy: Thavibu Art GalleryĪrt critic Bui Nhu Huong cites him as the pioneer of Vietnamese contemporary art, and many artists in recent years have expressed their admiration for his resistance to being constrained by social and official condemnation. Significant innovations included the appearance of performance art and of homosexual content in the artwork of Truong Tan, possibly the first openly gay Vietnamese visual artist. New galleries opened, foreign art collectors took an interest in this relatively unknown country and, although censorship by a watchful regime did not disappear, Vietnamese artists gained some freedoms.
In the 1990s, the contemporary art scene was booming in Hanoi. Since 2012, the country has celebrated gay pride (Viet Pride) annually, and, in 2016, it saw the launch of the first local gay social network, Blued, which sends about 2 million daily messages among users, according to the company.īut even if LGBT rights are still a work in progress in the country, Vietnamese contemporary art has been a pioneer in this realm for decades. Homosexuality was only removed from the official list of mental illnesses in 2001, and it is still largely frowned upon. The May 26 verdict raised the hopes of many LGBT activists throughout the region, especially in China and Vietnam.Īs is all too common worldwide, homophobia causes suffering in Vietnam, where until 2000 it was illegal for gay couples to live together. In an historical decision, Taiwan’s top court has ruled in favor of gay marriage.