In collaboration with Trần Hậu Yên Thế. Video.

Description

In this video, Hanoi-based artist and Vietnam National University professor Nguyễn Thế Sơn, in collaboration with artist and art researcher Trần Hậu Yên Thế, compares original architectural drawings of block apartment buildings in Hanoi from the 1950s to the 1980s to their recent condition in 2016. Many of the buildings between 1956 and 1965 were made of brick and designed by North Korean architects. After a building pause from 1965 to 1973 due to continual American bombings, architects from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany supported the construction of a new generation of concrete apartment buildings. After the Đối Mới policy of economic liberalization, everything turned around and upside down. Private shops and enterprises were opened on the ground floor, and buildings were covered in billboards and advertisements. The artist shows the city as a palimpsest straining beneath layers of old and new, with billboards obscuring windows, balconies, and ancient remains, which gives his photographs the character of a relief.

Description from "Vietnam in Transition, 1976–Present" Exhibition Catalog, 2023, p.33.