Nora Taylor
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Colonial Resistance as Seen by
Vietnamese Graphic Artists from the 1950s

This talk will discuss a collection of recently uncovered and previously unpublished political comic strips depicting the Vietnamese resistance to French colonial rule. The strip was created by three artists: Pham Thong, Mai Van Nam and Ton Duc Luong, all former students of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine in Hanoi. The drawings offer not only vivid eye witness accounts of historic events but also illustrate the extent of artists’ engagements in political issues of the day. The comic book is a relatively underdeveloped art and literary genre in Vietnam, and the discovery of this series proves the need for further research in, and preservation of, valuable iconographic archives both in Vietnam and abroad.

Nora Taylor received her PhD in Southeast Asian Art History at Cornell University in 1996. She is currently professor of Southeast Asian Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA. She grew up in Geneva Switzerland and is an expert in Vietnamese Art. Her research centers on modern and contemporary Vietnamese Art. She is the author of Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art, published by University of Hawaii Press in 2004 and republished by National University of Singapore Press in 2009.