Censorship: A Strategy to Rewrite Possibilities

Censorship and licensing procedures for artworks or art events in Vietnam remain a dark horse. Intolerable territories, tragicomedy plays and rusted machineries – such images metaphorically make up the nowadays discourses on censorship, a system that always seems to be ridiculously ambiguous. Are there any alternative modes of speaking, or viewing censorship in Vietnam?

In this piece of writing, as an observer of such procedural entanglements, I strive to argue about censorship on a comparative axis with artworks: censorship as a pulse to the innately bad-child manner of contemporary arts, and as an exchange of beliefs and ideologies between artworks and institutional power.

Theorist Julia Kristeva once defined how the playful language is an activator, an impulse that overturns rules and structures. Here, I borrow the linguistic playfulness she mentioned to speak on the plasticity of contemporary arts and the mechanisms of censorship.

Playfulness in contemporary arts traces itself to the boundless ability of our imaginations, memories and variable living experiences. All such things—imaginations, memories, lives—always envelope fantasies amidst the bubbles of reality. This hybrid condition manifests how contemporary arts cannot be molded into becoming the conforming denominator. Whereas censorships always stand sealed like tombs of mummies in the historical horror films – echoing to us not to tamper with them, not to fool around them, a reminder to be mindful of distancing from them, it is by being censored that artworks, with its nature of disorder and chaos, come to play around foolishly triggering the rules of power.

Artworks and censorships, from here, fall into a game of hit-and-run. Indeed, though such a constant back-and-forth race between two actors is vertiginous and muddled, it is the disorderly that manifests the symptoms, signs of life. Censorships are not simply tethered to definitive discourses, restrained in a binary perspective. To think further, it also spares an interval for the unstructured entities and realities; for censorship itself is an admission of the muddy waters of the presence, an admittance of the art’s existence.

Responding to curator Nguyễn Như Huy’s brief critique on censorship as a byproduct of ideologies in The First Conference on Curating in Vietnam’s session, I anchored to his suggestion to delve into expanding a vantage point that reimagines censorships.  Here, my essay lands on discussing the case of a solo exhibition by poet/painter Bùi Chát, titled Improvisation, that took place in 2022 at Alpha Art Station (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam).

At the time of the exhibition, apart from receiving administrative sanctions, painter Bùi Chát was obliged to destroy 29 paintings showcased in the exhibition on account of licensing violations. According to data surveyed and documented in Artistic Freedom Report Vietnam: An ever-changing terrain by Linh Lê, there is a rough estimate of around or more 81 cases of art events sanctioned due to the lack of licensing papers in the last 12 years. Amidst countless cases of censorship, a number either doubled or tripled every year, what makes Improvisation become ever more attracting, attention-galvanizing than such past instances?   

Solicited to demolish 29 pictures

Under the premise of unavailable licensed paperworks, The People’s Committee of Ho Chi Minh City required the artist to demolish his paintings besides the administrative penalty.

Perhaps, the word “demolishing” strikes our common sense as a too-much penalty. The word indeed has a heavy connotation, one that is much more solemn than vocabularies often seen in censorship tales in Vietnam. People refer to demolishing evidence, exhibits, etc, hence the word becomes an allusion to acts associated with guilty-pleading criminals. However, in the fine issued by the in-charge inspectors, artworks are what are told to be demolished. As we come into proximity with the word “demolishing/destroy”, underlied with oppressiveness and power imbalance, our repressed yet collective frustration about the entrenched power asymmetry reverberates, amplified into a polyphonic voice.

The clear-cut dichotomy of positions and hierarchy between the artist and the censorship administrators unavoidably pushes the artist into a position more fragile, more victimized in face of the whirlwind of censorships, hence flattening out the ever-changing landscape of the arts in Vietnam. 

In lieu of labeling censorships as violence-streaked manipulations of institutions, or continuously acting all vocal and angered at the existing asymmetrical power, I want to propose a new mode of understanding the policing, the silencing of censorship: censorship as a strategy that reimagines the long-buried possibilities of the Vietnamese art & literature history. 

To understand why censorship in Improvisation is a blessing in disguise, a power that breathes life into possibilities of margins, we have to understand Bùi Chát’s legacy.

Bùi Chát is one of the pioneers of the samizdat publishing format in Vietnam, leading the publishing house “Scrap Paper (Giấy Vụn).^[1]” While poetry has never matched any  institutional publishing house’s palate, Scrap Paper reimagines new forms of poetry publications. Scrap Paper prints out photocopies of young authors’ written poems whose aesthetics are deemed indigestible to the public, then scatters printed copies down the pavements, the streets in Saigon.  

One of the most provoking attempts of Bùi Chát towards the mausoleums of normative aesthetics at the same time includes his bodies of lexicons including Trash Poetry, Dirty Poetry, Cemetery Poetry. Such terms brought to life by Bui Chat suggest nondenominational expressions of the poetry language, a playful character with a stark, satirical and unembellished lexicon system.

thơ jác

từ jưởi
tôi ngịch thơ
jã chàng ngịch cát
con lít ngịch những thứ khác^[2]

Bùi Chát is not the archetype of an ethics preacher. He speaks of the mundane, peripheral yet the way he seemingly plays innocuously with language has trembled the shrines of norms.

After certain unfortunate incidents^[3], Bùi Chát’s poetry practice soon became fragmented, his samizdat publications falling into pieces, hereby, people’s  memory about Bùi Chát as a figure conducive to chronology of Vietnamese arts and literature soon receded into oblivion. The “political turbulence” (Nhã Thuyên, 2012) alluding to him, has subdued the complexity of Bùi Chát’s legacy. His name by now is reduced to one that simply frequents forgettable conversations once in a while.

On the other side of the fence, the instance of extreme censorship in Improvisation by Bùi Chát is an unthinkable stroke of luck. Though censorship drives contemporary arts to an at-stake situation, it is the generativity, productivity of censorship that builds up new typologies for a landscape knowingly repressed by the obsession with the rights versus wrongs, the decorum versus the misconducts. It is all about disorders, controversies, the public policings pressed down on Improvisation, prompting us to interrogate what is most primary about the identity of Bùi Chát,. What kind of poet he used to be, what he used to write. How can we position him in the ebbs and flows of the ironed-out literature, arts?

Censorship and the open-ended tales around the solicitation of demolishing artworks belonging to the Improvisation exhibition feeds the public hunger to be inundated with information. At the same time, such a historical instance of censorship instigates those who may find Bùi Chát irrelevant to their time, those who come from a different era to circle back to that past, delving into the fragmented influx of information – reinvigorating what was thought to have been unrecoverable in the memory retrieval.

Indeed, in an interview with BBC, Bùi Chát did clarify how artworks in Improvisation have no specifications, no intentions, they come out rather as pure art, art in itself^[4]. Frankly, such artworks of him are visibly not encoded with a tincture of his once-prominent, rule-bending poetry practices. Such practices of him, abstract painting and poetry-writing, appear seemingly independent of and separated from one another, bearing no relevance. However, censorships, contoured by a character of magnetism and generativity, have glued these culturally significant events together, standing in unison, with unity, eliciting in us the drive, the impulse, the innate curiosity to excavate the critical history of Bùi Chát.

However, only one month after, the authority’s decision to demolish his painting was revoked – 29 paintings of Bui Chat became unscathed. The chronology of the event speaks to us how the layers and the complexity of censorship cannot be simplified. Compared to the state of censorship in Vietnam in the past periods, we can hardly assert that the body of censorship has improved. However, the switch in the decision making process partly is a lit-up hope that, in the least, censorship cannot be reduced to one or two answers of either Yes or No.

Censorship has always been something that drains art practitioners. However, to keep trudging through that mountain’s slip of surveillance, shall we think of censorship as a vital light yet to be unearthed, an impulse that creates trans-time, trans-spatial conversations. For that is also when we reverse the power imbalance – using the tools of the power-holder to uncover what those in power have been trying to obliterate.

About the author:
Nguyễn Thanh-Tâm (b. 2006) works with translations, poetry and performance art. Her poetry has been featured or will be featured on The Offing and The Arkansas International. What she translates can be found at documenta fifteen, Miami Book Fair, Karachi Biennale.

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^[1] Samizdat: is a word combined by “sam’ which means “self,” and izdatelstvo, which means “publishing” in Russian. Samizdat denotes a subversive publication movement in literature and political news reports where works are circulated and published outside the sphere of authorial control.

^[2] This is excerpted from Bùi Chát’s poetry anthology. thơ jác/ từ jưởi” means trashy poetry, trashy words. In Vietnam, rác rưởi means trashy. Here, Bùi Chát cuts the Vietnamese word in halves and replaces some of the original words in the phrase  “rác rưởi” with alternative letters, eg: “r” replaced by “j”, etc.

^[3]  In 2011, Bùi Chát was named the recipient of the IPA Freedom to Publish Prize. When he returned to his motherland, he was detained by the police, while his award and books were confiscated.

^[4] https://www.bbc.com/vietnamese/vietnam-62516403

Works Cited

Kristeva, J., & Moi, T. (2002). The Kristeva Reader. Blackwell.
Le, L. (n.d.). Artistic Freedom Report Vietnam: An ever-changing terrain. ArtsEquator.
Nhã-Thuyên. cuộc nổi dậy của rác thải[1]. Tạp chí Da Màu. https://damau.org/26332/cuoc-noi-day-cua-rac-thai1
Thơ việt, từ hiện đại đến hậu hiện đại. (n.d.). Inrasara.
Mai-Thụy. Xử phạt triển lãm không phép của bùi chát, giao họa sĩ tự tiêu hủy tranh. Tuổi Trẻ.