Untitled (woman with yellow daisy)

Nguyen Hai Chi (Choé)

Vietnamese artist Nguyen Hai Chi (Choé) is best known in Asia as a political cartoonist and satirist, who managed to offend both sides during the Viet Nam war. His first cartoon, for a weekly newspaper in 1969, showed a tiny man—representing the people of Vietnam, a neutralist third force — standing between two giant legs, one of the Communists and one of the West. The Thieu government arrested the cartoonist as a ‘Communist agent’ in 1975; the Communist government considered him a ‘reactionary’ and kept him in a re-education camp in 1976, where he remained until 1987.

The first paintings that the painter did were about his relatives and most of his works focused on wives, children and Vietnamese women. These subjects could be seen in his photo set, “Women of My Country” which consisted of ten paintings created for the Asian Cartoon Exhibition held in Japan in 1995. These oil paintings were created on poonah paper with iron pen and watercolour, revealing the soul of a wife and mother who always takes care of her husband and children.

"Poonah paper", a traditonal Vietnamese paper is made from the bark of the Rhamnoneuron plant through complicated and precise processing steps. The craft of making poonah paper was practised and handed down from generation to generation in some craft villages in the northern delta area. It is now enjoying a rivival.

Choé's work was described by author Barry Hilton: 'Choé favors ladies portraits and their daily activities, such as 'Schoolgirl', 'Young Girls', 'Dalat in Evening...He seems to sense deeply the fates and hardships of Vietanmese women in the past and wants to cry out their dreams, and maybe that is the reason why Choé depicted them in a very carefree and peaceful nuance and settings.