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span class="inline inline-left">The Train, oil on canvas by Nguyen Manh Hung, 100x130 cm. Courtesy of Art Vietnam galleryA twist of fate led an American woman to Vietnam, where she helped fuel an art boom.

“This is a story about how beauty and privilege can create their own paths, throw their own light and are powerful agents of change,” writes New York-based author Elizabeth Rush in the preface to her upcoming book The Hidden World: One Woman’s Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Vietnamese Art, a collaborative memoir told in the voice of Suzanne Lecht, founder of Hanoi’s iconic and highly regarded Art Vietnam gallery.

Rush, who is currently working on a children’s book in collaboration with Indonesian artist Eddie Hara to be published by Things Asian Press, has discovered a unique and fascinating story about how personal tragedy can be turned into triumph.

In 1994, Lecht, then a recently widowed woman originally from Kansas, moved to Vietnam on an impulse. The book describes the personal experiences that led Lecht to live in the Southeast Asian country in the midst of an artistic revolution, a cause to which she would commit her life.

Lecht’s husband, Charley, had been a much sought-after information guru who advised corporate clients and world leaders. Lecht gave up her career as an interior designer to follow him, along the way collecting artworks.

She was in Tokyo after her husband’s sudden death, packing up her belongings in preparation to move home, when she came across an airline magazine featuring a story on a group of young Vietnamese artists known as the “Gang of Five”.

The article proclaimed their work as representing the future of contemporary Vietnamese art, as the artists had chosen to break away from the Soviet realist style that had been previously enforced to celebrate expression and interpretation.

The images in the magazine were so exciting to Lecht that she called her moving company and rerouted her shipment to Hanoi.

“I, for one, expected to find art that attempted to come to terms with what had been lost on the long path towards Vietnamese independence,” Rush writes, in the voice of Lecht, recalling that crossroads moment.

“I see now that my assumption had as much to do with my own experience of Vietnam — as a war and nothing else — as it did with my understanding of the ways in which art reflects life.

“But when I first flipped through those glossy pages, I honestly didn’t understand why or how those North Vietnamese artists had painted what they had. Their work was earnest and innocent, naïve almost. Each image was a celebration of everyday objects and everyday joys. Let me show them to you again: an animal, a woman, a flower, a pond, a boy and a flat blue sky.”

Revolutionary Movement

Two months later, on her second day in Hanoi, while visiting Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, Lecht met a friend of Pham Quang Vinh, one of the artists she had seen in the magazine and a father of contemporary art in Hanoi.

That afternoon Suzanne visited the artist’s house, where he was working on a self-portrait, The Artist and the Model.

Awed by the juxtaposition of traditional Vietnamese motifs — thousand-year-old mythical birds and hurricane oil lamps — against the contemporary and inward-looking gaze of an artist painting a portrait, Lecht knew that she had stumbled upon a revolutionary moment in the city’s artistic development. The rest was, as they say, history.

The poetic beauty permeating the series of events that led Suzanne Lecht to the center of Hanoi’s then emerging contemporary art scene, now dynamic, groundbreaking and closely watched by international collectors and critics, is brought to life in the details and nuances of Rush’s writing.

Drawing on her own experiences as a single American woman in Hanoi working with the city’s contemporary artists, Rush infuses the recollections with a voice that is poignant with self-reflection — a touch that perhaps only a trusted author could pull off with a mix of both objectivity and empathy.

Together, the two women have created a personal and powerful testimony to the private perspectives of history in the making.

Rush shares the background to her book and the unexpected rewards and challenges of writing a memoir on someone else’s behalf.

How would you describe the book?

Not only is it Suzanne’s personal story, it’s also the story of a city and the city’s most revolutionary artists undergoing incredible flux.

I mean, up until 1986 the state ran all of the public exhibition spaces, so every single painting that was hung was more or less exhibited with the intent that that image would contribute to creating and upholding a Vietnamese national identity.

Not only was there nothing critical of the state, there was very little that was not a beautiful Vietnamese landscape or a beautiful Vietnamese woman. Almost every image was in some sense kind of “traditional”.

But as the country opened its doors to foreign investment in 1986, new wealth flooded in, and what was once a completely state-run art scene began to undergo rapid transformations.

By 1997 there were 60 privately owned art galleries in Hanoi, and while you still had to ask for approval to hang a piece from the Ministry of Culture, the regulations about what styles an artist could paint in, and what images they could produce had loosened considerably… I like to think of it as a time when the young artists were discovering freedom of expression.

Many of the things they began to produce were simple images taken from their everyday lives — like the ones Suzanne saw in the magazine. And while they seem harmless enough from our perspective they really are emblematic of a movement away from communally arrived at identities. In some sense, along with “freedom of expression” came a cult of the individual.

What was your process?

Suzanne dug out old videos she shot when she first arrived, her journal and also tons of picture books. We used those as jumping off points and I started to really study personal memoir as a genre to see what types of questions authors were asking themselves and why.

Then I turned those same questions towards Suzanne. I have to say that Suzanne has no children and over the course of the year and a half that we did these interviews it felt like I became her daughter in a way.

She calls me “the daughter of her heart”. So yes, it’s a pretty wonderful and intimate relationship we have.

How did you incorporate your own experiences?

Well, I would say that many of the textures, colors, sounds and smells came from my experience. I would always check them with Suzanne and say, “Hey, was everything really gray and yellow back then?” And she would tell me.

So even if the things I found in Hanoi were recent additions they were starting places ... If they were wrong they were steps along the path of me discovering how the city has evolved over the past 15 lightning-fast years.

The challenges?

One of the challenges I faced was really massaging my voice into Suzanne’s. For a while I was writing drafts that felt as though they hovered just a few inches away from Suzanne, drafts that didn’t inhabit her interior, I guess you could say.

And I think that was a product of having not lived through the very things I was describing, but the
closer I got to Suzanne, the less self-conscious I became about making her voice my own, and so the story lost that removed feeling and became more intimate. But that probably didn’t happen until the 10th draft or something.

The rewards?

Running in the Forest, gouache on paper by Dinh Thi Tham Poong, 1998, 38x60 cm. Courtesy of Art Vietnam galleryWell, the unexpected reward for me was my relationship with Suzanne. I mean Hanoi can be a lonely place for a young American woman and my hours with Suzanne helped me remember the joys of telling stories in your native language with people who share a similar cultural reference point.

Not that getting out of your comfort zone is a bad thing — it’s amazing — it’s just that it can be a little isolating feeling at times and my work on The Hidden World helped me feel closer to humanity.

And Suzanne’s unexpected reward was that it really helped her to heal from the untimely death of her husband. He had been such a huge part in her life and when he died she really didn’t grieve; instead, she moved to Vietnam.

So 16 years later, after telling me her story it felt like she had finally closed that chapter of her life.

She recently fell in love again, and she said that she thought that might not have been possible without our work on The Hidden World. It’s a really wonderful unexpected reward.