Response to “‘Pho’ Phai and Faux Phais: The Market for Fakes and the Appropriation of a Vietnamese National Symbol” by Nora Taylor

In “‘Pho’ Phai and Faux Phais: The Market for Fakes and the Appropriation of a Vietnamese National Symbol,” Nora Taylor explains how Westerners desired Vietnamese art for its authenticity, similar to the desire for primitive art from africa and asia in colonial and postcolonial America and Europe, since they saw the market as untainted by the contemporary art world. However, the Vietnamese market, to the surprise of many Westerners, included many forgeries, and in fact was impossible to sustain without forgeries. Taylor focuses on painter Bui Xuan Phai, whose artworks were prolifically forged after his death, to show how international trading of art entangles it in “art, authenticity and the cultural production of taste.” Phai was often viewed in terms of artist mystification, with his prevalence in an underground banned artists coffee shop and him never having sold a painting in his lifetime. This mystification led to his posthumous proliferation in the art world, and in the early 1990’s, as Vietnam began to enter the global market, his paintings fulfilled the expectations of Western visitors of “folkloric, more quaint, more Asian, less abstract” art. Taylor explains that Western interest in his art shows how Westerners had a nostalgia for “old” Hanoi, a less Western looking Hanoi, that Vietnamese people do not share. This international rise in Phai’s popularity led to the creation of fakes, however Vietnamese artists were unconcerned as they had differing ideas surrounding authenticity and originality in art. Intellectual property, like Nike or Phai’s paintings, are seen as publicly embedded once on the market. Phai’s paintings have become “logo-ized” due to their demand. And since Phai’s work wasn’t documented, it is hard for ill-equipped Vietnamese museums to authenticate the works, making tales of forgery not as interesting to the public in Vietnam as they are in the west. Taylor comes to the conclusion that no Phai painting is “real,” and instead that the idea of Phai was created in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a collective emblem of his fellow Vietnamese artist, which led to his prominence in the art market as Vietnam’s economy globalized. Phai’s style has become an image of Hanoi perpetuated by either the Vietnamese art community or by Western collectors, but has nothing to do with Hanoi himself. Taylor claims Phai’s image shows where art sits in construction culture and nationhood.

 

Taylor has solid reasoning behind her discussion of the rise in popularity of Phai. I expected an analysis of Western art collections, their desire for authenticity in developing markets, and their nostalgia for a less “westernized” Hanoi. However, looking at how the Vietnamese artists’ image of Phai not only shaped his posthumous reputation, but also his works’ influence was well done and less expected. She used this angle to further observe how the Vietnamese view authenticity and forgery. I think her analysis fell flat when she analyzed the Western nostalgic view of Hanoi and the Vietnamese artist’s view of Phai. She mentions how many Vietnamese people don’t have the same nostalgia for “old” Hanoi, but that is as far as the dialogue between the two seemed to go. She could have talked more about how the Vietnamese artists’ views of Phai as an “emblem of the nation” seemed to counterintuitively perpetuate the nostalgia for an old Hanoi through neoliberal analysis of Phai’s rise in the market and his forgeries’ subsequent rise. She instead seemed to view the ideas as more separate, but didn’t seem to justify that separation in the essay. I also wonder if Western ideals of authenticity have in some sense “spoiled” ideas of public domain based markets in Vietnam, and I wish Taylor would have touched on it more.

 

Questions:

How far can the sentiment surrounding there being no real Phai paintings be extended in the art world? Is it not reductionist to both an artist and their talents to claim that their existence in the art world is totally reliant on the cultural values of the artistic communities to which they are marketed?

 

Where does the view of what we would call intellectual property as public domain in Vietnam stem from? Cultural Values? Economic values?

 

Quotes:

“The nostalgia For ‘Old Hanoi’ is best described by Panivong Norindr as the perpetuation oFthe Indochina Fantasy that was created during the colonial period (Norindr 1996). The vogue For Indochina in French popular culture is explained by Norindr as a way For France to come to terms with its role as a colonial empire.”

 

“I came to the conclusion that there are in fact no ‘real’ Phais. Phai exists in the eye of the beholder.”

 

“The fact that both Vietnamese historians — who have rehabilitated Phai and designated him a national symbol of wartime grief— and international art collectors - who see in him the emblem of the colonial past - consider Phai to embody their respective notions of what is Vietnamese, says much about art’s role in constructing ideas about culture, history and nationhood“