Friendship and its Affects: Networking the Local and the Global from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Abstract

How do networks of friendships and personal relationships affect Vietnamese artists both inside and outside of Vietnam? This thesis illustrates the ways in which artists from Vietnam use personal relations and friendships to substitute for a lack of infrastructural support in-country, as well as to counter stereotypes of Vietnamese art in the global art world. From the position of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, this thesis presents a situated knowledge of the Vietnamese contemporary art world in the context of globalisation—specifically through the interrogation of the affective relationships between friends that make up, in-part, the translocal flows of the glocal. Through using performance as its methodology, this thesis demonstrates the way in which friendship thus becomes the place from which we can begin to understand the world’s interconnectedness, and to better know the Other by way of the (imperfect) self. It further considers how artists from Vietnam are using their friendship and their art to challenge the West’s temporal concept of itself as the future present in relation to areas traditionally designated as the periphery. As a piece of performative writing, this thesis is an act of decolonisation in the mind of its author, and a contribution to a more equitably conceived global imaginary.