Abstract

This research offers the audience an answer as to how war traumas have been expressed artworks using Tam-Giao (Buddhist-Taoist-Confucianist philosophy) means. This research focuses on the question: what is the role of Tam-Giao culture in the visual representation of Vietnamese post war traumas between 1985 and 2015? In examining how to understand the art of expression in Tam-Giao culture in the post war context, the researcher has involved artists, critics, writers, researchers and art collectors in trying to answer the question. This book also identifies the changes in the Vietnamese visual arts and explains how they reflect the most fundamental principles behind the cultural changes that have occurred in postwar Vietnamese society since 1975. In doing so, this book focuses on a group of artists who, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, produced artworks representing their postwar traumas after the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. The Vietnamese visual arts have changed profoundly since 1986 when, as a result of the liberalising Doi Moi Policy, Vietnamese artists were given access to global digital technologies. Never before have Vietnamese artists been so complex, so engaged or so diverse in their expression. The types of cultural changes shown in Vietnamese visual representations include the expansion of national and individual identity that occurred after 1985, the economic development of the postwar period, the aftermath of the conflicts of war, and the influences of international art on Vietnamese art.