A Turning Point on Nguyen Hue Street

On Reunification Day in Ho Chi Minh City, as fireworks split the night sky and parades marched beneath banners of patriotic fervor, something unexpected unfolded on Nguyen Hue walking street: a public installation by Le Huu Hieu, better known as Henry Le. Amid the official spectacles, Le’s installation, From the Victory of Bach Đằng to the Great Victory of April 30, 1975, materialised like a fever dream of national memory—lacquered, sculpted, spiked, and, yes, politically potent.

Spanning 38 square metres, the largest Vietnamese lacquer painting ever made stood at its core. Around it, eviscerated ghost figures writhed in silence, and a full-sized tank—reversed and impaled—upended decades of state iconography. It was irreverent. It was permitted. It was, astonishingly, state-sanctioned.

When History Meets Experiment

Le’s work drew on Vietnam’s 1288 naval victory at Bach Dang, where Mongol ships were destroyed by hidden wooden stakes. He sourced real stakes from the original forest and staged them like spectral sentinels. The upside-down tank, a visual exorcism of triumphalist propaganda, anchored the scene in contemporary dissonance.

That such a politically resonant installation appeared in public—mere steps from a statue of Ho Chi Minh—is nearly unprecedented. Since the war’s end, Vietnamese public art has been tightly constrained. Only with the Doi Moi reforms in the late 1980s did artists gain even modest creative latitude, and even now, most galleries avoid applying for permits that might invite state scrutiny.

Yet 2024 has brought change. Alongside Le’s project, artist Tia-Thuy Nguyen installed Resurrection in Hanoi: a 20-foot Nacre tree encased in gleaming steel, memorialising French colonial urbanism with poetic ambiguity. It was a work the old guard might have once found dangerously polyvalent. Now, it stands permanently in the capital.

A Brief, Glorious, Unstable History of Public Contemporary Art

To understand the gravity of Le’s exhibition, one must glance back at Vietnam’s fraught relationship with public art:

• In the 1990s, works like Dinh Quan’s screaming faces on the Red River were guerrilla interventions, instantly erased.
• In 2006, the Saigon Open City project sought to bring contemporary art to the masses. One highlight, Flight—a bamboo-and-rice-paper fighter jet by Nguyen Manh Hung and Bradford Edwards—was briefly installed on museum grounds before the permit was revoked. The state wasn’t ready to soften the machinery of memory.

No large-scale, politically sensitive public artwork appeared in Ho Chi Minh City again—until April 2024.c assembly underscores Christie’s Hong Kong as not merely a marketplace but a global crossroad, where East and West, modern and contemporary, classicism and avant-garde converge under the hammer.

Le’s Rise and the Politics of Presence

Le’s sudden prominence may seem meteoric, but his trajectory has been quietly international:

• 2017: Florence Biennale
• 2021: Soul Energy in Venice, which drew the attention of the Biennale team
• 2024: Invited to represent Vietnam at the Venice Biennale (without state support)
• 2026: Negotiations underway for Vietnam’s first official national pavilion

His recent pop-up was not without controversy. Some conservatives decried it as an affront to traditional beauty; some artists muttered about kitsch and propaganda. But critic Ly Doi called it a “risky exhibition” and “a blessing for the whole city.” Millions visited. Many saw contemporary art for the first time in their lives.

Le’s installation might be remembered as a hinge in Vietnam’s cultural history—a moment when public art became a site of dialogue, not decree. It remains uncertain whether this signals a lasting liberalization or a one-off anomaly. But for two weeks in April, amid the state’s golden anniversaries and celebratory drone shows, a red lacquered tank lay overturned on Nguyen Hue Street, and the people gathered to see it.

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