ĐÔNG HỒ WOOD BLOCKS

This 500 year old folkart tradition depics everyday scenes in spring around the celebration of Tết.

The lively prints have a Vietnamese sensitivity, imbued with the auspicious symbols of zodiac creatures, texts and politics that are at play during the harvest festival. Pigment saturated and shimmering Điệp paper covered in mother of pearl dust is used for these traditional woodblocks. Through Hànội to Bác Ninh, Đông Hồ arts and crafts are a way to celebrate the graphic humour, joy and political resistance of Northern Vietnamese image-production.

Here, the metaphoric depiction of the Đám Cưới Chuột ‘Rat Wedding’ takes on the anthropomorphic rituals of a lively Vietnamese wedding procession. Serendipitously, the depictions of class and political subservience in this famous image is relevant to the sequential domination of Vietnam under Chinese, French, Japanese and American rule. The imagery of the rat is most relevant to a post-colonial retelling of the Great Rat Massacre in 1902. This event exemplifies the failure of a colonial governance structure that set into motion a series of unintended public health and economic responses by the Vietnamese people. Like in the image of a Rat Wedding laying offerings to their master, the cat, these events carry the unmistakable irony of Vietnamese defiance and subversion in moments of both celebration and tyranny.

Prompterd to crawl into the sewers running beneath the French quarter in Hànội to catch and kill sewer rats for a small bounty as the bubonic plaque was spreading across other parts of Asia, local Vietnamese during the Great Rat Masssacre enterprisingly only cut off their tails and set the rats free. Undermining French public health decrees and allowing the rats to continue their reproduction cycle, this perverse incentive payment system was prolongued to the frustration of the French authorities.

By subtlely adjusting these prints, tailess Đông Hồ rats are seen to act out the processional celebrations of their human counterparts. Refering to the rats running free in Hànội during their attempted massacre; the physical mutilations and injuries of daily life become ultimately transformed by the humour, opportunism and infuriating spirit of Vietnamese disobedience.