ĐÔNG HỒ WOOD BLOCKS

This 500 year old folkarts depics everyday scenes in spring around the celebration of Tết. The lively prints have a Vietnamese sensitivity, imbued with the traditional beliefs and auspicious symbols of zodiac creatures, texts and politics at play during the harvest festival. Saturated and shimmering Điệp paper covered in mother of pearl dust is used for writing poetry, painting, and making woodblocks. Through Hànội to Bác Ninh, Đông Hồ arts and crafts are a way to celebrate the graphic humour, joy and resistance of Northern Vietnamese image-making.

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 bridges both domination of Vietnam under Chinese and French rule. Applicable to a post-colonial retelling of the Great Rat Massacre in 1902. This event exemplifies the failure of a colonial governance that had set into motion a series of unintended public health and economic responses affecting the lives of Vietnamese people. Like in the image of a Rat Wedding laying offerings to the cat, these events carry the unmistakable irony of Vietnamese defiance and subversion in the face of both celebration and tyranny.

Instead of killing sewer rats for a substantial plague bounty, locals during the Great Rat Masssacre simply cut off their tails and set them free, allowing the rats to reproduce and continue playing a role in the enterprise of extracting money from the the French authorities.

Subtlely adjusting these images, tailess Đông Hồ rats are seen acting out the processional celebrations of their equallity complex human counterparts. Like the Vietnamese, the mutilation and forced compromises of life are ultimately part of the humour, festivities and spirit of Vietnamese disobedience.