There was something calming about the chaos. Something about the piercing electric guitar cutting through the burning ropes around us; the primal cries from the man in green as he scaled his stone tower.
There was something about those sounds and the smell of smoke and the scattered raindrops falling on our faces.
We wandered, slowly, staring up at the man. Among us, down on earth, were hordes of bare-skinned humans and glowing bulbous sculptures and the jungle. The music grew louder. The fires kept burning. The man in green continued to climb, further and further from the darkened disarray below.
As I lit a cigarette, I realized where this calmness was coming from: from knowing that, in this moment, I was part of a rebellion.
~ ~ ~
Đào Anh Khánh has exhibited his colorful, corporeal paintings in sixteen countries and performed across the globe. He runs an eccentric, eco-friendly guesthouse and gallery in Hanoi. He is the architect behind the first “art valley” in Southeast Asia. He’s overwhelmingly multi-hyphenate: he describes himself as an environmentalist, a sculptor, performing artist, musician, painter, a consummate romanticist—a surrealist whose mind escapes to “the outer reaches of the universe in search of tranquility.”
Before emerging as a boundary-pushing, ethereal artist in Vietnam, Khánhspent nearly twenty years on the ground, policing his future peers. As an undercover officer in Hanoi, Khánh’s job was to monitor artists the government saw as a threat. However, he found the artistic community more intriguing than dangerous and, under the guise of investigative pursuits, convinced his supervisors to let him enroll in art school. A few years later, in the early nineties, he quit the force to pursue art full-time.
But by that time, Khánh had grown sick of the socialist realism that saturated the Vietnamese art world. While the country loosened its grip on censorship in the eighties, after welcoming in a new quasi-capitalist era of economic reforms, the culture ministry retrograded before the turn of the century—once again penalizing artists who portrayed Vietnam in anything but a positive light. Some artists managed to break free from these constraints, but they often received political backlash; galleries were mostly filled with patriotic paintings and hyper-realistic portraits of Hồ Chí Minh.
So Khánh left his home country for the first time and traveled to France, where he was exposed to new art forms: the disfiguring performances of Olivier de Sagazan, the immense installations of Louise Bourgeois, the auditory experiments of Pierre Schaeffer. He experienced an artistically unbridled society, free of the restraints he once (albeit apathetically) enforced. He wanted to bring this sense of creative freedom to Vietnam, to make art unbound by the intangible ropes of censorship. And so, on returning home, Khánh began his transformation from officer to romantic surrealist, from civil servant to radical creator—from mortal to the man in green.
~ ~ ~
There is a long dirt path that separates the valley from the real world. Usually it would be easy to miss, with a hidden sliver of an entrance off a busy street in the Hòa Bình province. But today, on this cloudy afternoon in late March, it was swarming with hippies and high-heeled Vietnamese women, with leather-clad bikers and musicians in bright-lensed glasses. We were a sundry group of expats and locals and visitors from across the globe, but we were all heading down the same path, away from our humdrum realities and into the realm of Khánh’screation.
A few days prior, my boyfriend and I met a dreadlocked couple in Hanoi while backpacking through Northern Vietnam. They told us about a free music and arts festival that weekend—their friends were performing, we could all split a taxi.
“It’s run by this 60-year-old artist who’s a pretty big deal in Vietnam,” they told us between puffs of a joint. “He’s famous for his penis sculptures.”
Filled with the intrepid curiosity of two first-time backpackers, we soon found ourselves walking down that dirt path as motorbikes whizzed past us, the flutter from the main street growing quieter and quieter, until finally, we reached it: the gateway to another galaxy, one punctuated by sculptures of screaming clay faces, looming phallic towers, and dancing murals. We were encompassed by a towering structure of wood and woven ropes, separating this world from the one outside.
We had arrived at Đáo Xuân—or “Spring Comes”—the ninth and final of Dao Anh Khánh’s annual 24-hour celebration of eccentricity and expression. Held in his Gầm Trời Valley, a 10-hectare plot of land tucked among the jungle, it was packed with performances and installations by over 250 creators from 20 different countries. It was the biggest art festival Vietnam had ever seen. It was Khánh’smagum opus.
The valley was filled with love and law-breaking, with a dreamlike dissonance that was, somehow, harmonic. We stood at the edge of a stone pit as a leopard-clad dancer beat a steel water tank and thrashed her body to a frantic drumbeat. A man belted operatically as the sun set while a woman swirled under a translucent white veil. We smoked thuốc lào with a freestyling Hanoian rapper. Naked artists doused themselves in paint. Experimental musicians played throbbing, tuneless vibrations that echoed across the valley. We bounced to funky French DJs, swung and sang to an Afrobeat band. We were in a chaotically colorful, constantly moving universe—one that turned strangers into friends and reality into a distant memory. We were inside the mind of Dao Anh Khánh.
~ ~ ~
All artistic exhibitions in Vietnam are required to obtain official permits by the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. Those permits are often denied if the art does not portray the Communist party in a favorable light, if they contain anything provocative, or for a multitude of seemingly arbitrary reasons. Artists and gallerists are harassed by officials. Exhibitions are shut down; magazines forced to recall issues. Journalists are jailed for years after quick closed-door trials.
Some artists, however, are able to retain a certain level of freedom in Vietnam—partially due to corruption, partially because of the benefits of convolution. It’s often difficult to tell what Khánh is doing. Besides his palpably phallic towers (“yes, they are exactly what you think they are,” he told the Wall Street Journal), he likes to keep his art abstract (“it’s safer if the police don’t understand it”). He uses vague, airy language to describe his pieces and their connection to the world. Sometimes it’s hard to see any connection between the two at all: in 2012, Khánh walked around Hoàn Kiếm Lake one centimeter at a time in an apparent call for environmental protection. This purposeful obscurity is one of the reasons Khánh hasn’t been arrested in almost seven years, when he wandered the streets of Hanoi wearing only a loincloth.
Yet much of Khánh’s work isn’t so impenetrable that you can’t discern its inherent meaning. In one performance, covered in a suit of cash, he tore bills off his body while standing on a burning bamboo stage—a demonstration of his disdain for the corruption and dirty money that runs rampant in Vietnam. At his guesthouse in Hanoi, laptops are stabbed onto painted tree limbs, depicting the clashing coexistence of the natural and digital worlds. And that night, in the heart of the jungle, I watched Khánh climb his stone tower, rising above the noose of censorship, and letting it fade to ash.
~ ~ ~
The screech of an electronic guitar jolted me from the after-midnight haze. People stopped in their tracks and looked up. I could see the smoke rising behind them, the woven ropes of the wooden structure flickering with flames. I turned, and there he was: the man in green.
He was halfway up the 100-foot tower. His climb was like a dance; his mouth wide open, the music screaming for him. He was writhing and howling, his bright neon gown and long black hair lit up by the surrounding flames. It was like he was trying to expel all of the world’s pain from his body while he climbed. In a way, he was.
Khánh’s artistic defiance has not relieved Vietnam of its deep-rooted corruption or censorship, but the fact that he rebels against it brings these moments of catharsis in an oppressive world. We are all bound by something—whether it be the strings tightened by our governments or the constraints we create in our own minds. But as I stood in the valley that night, halfway high with a face smeared in glitter, among the bikers and hippies and high-heeled women, I realized that all of us were united in Khánh’s rebellion. And for a moment, everyone was free.
