Festival and revolution in the highlands of Vietnam: A Vietnamese artist shows how the revolution came to a mountain people in Central Vietnam

Abstract

Spring Festival on the High Plateaus (figure 1) is the name given by Vietnamese artist Tran Huu Chat to an engraved, painted, and lacquered wooden panel executed in 1962 and acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Hanoi. As so often in Vietnamese art of recent decades, this large (120 × 96 cm), elaborate, and richly populated composition is socially and politically charged, but it is also of exceptional ethnographic significance. The theme of solidarity in revolutionary struggle between ethnic minorities and the Vietnamese majority is that of much Vietnamese art of the U.S. war period, especially poster art. Moreover, this homage to Vietnamese “primitives” is in the spirit of President Ho Chi Minh's own repudiation of racism; his 1945 Declaration of Independence avoids any equivalent of the term “merciless Indian savages” contained in its model, the U.S. Declaration of Independence.