In 1993 Vietnam was a very different place to the one visitors see today. It was emerging from a period of isolation and economic hardship. Almost twenty years since Saigon fell, marking the end of a tragic war and reunification of the country, the remnants of that war were still easily found. Boys would walk the streets of the cities with trays of engraved Zippos and military badges for sale to tourists, I saw women sheltering their fruit stalls from the sun beneath canopies improvised from old parachutes, farmers fencing their land with rusting scrap metal, brass shell casings were being spun into incense holders and sold at roadside stalls and the landscape bore eerie scars of violent destruction by mines, bombs and defoliants. But the people demonstrated immense hospitality to visitors and an unbounded optimism for the future.
A broken bridge in the then sleepy seaside town of Hoi An brought me closer to the heart of this country. Pausing to watch the river flow by, I was approached by a group of students from a nearby house who wanted to practice English. Lunch was going to be a universally poor student affair, so I took my new friends to the market. Duck, fresh fish and bright fresh vegetables and salad leaves were soon an enviable feast, washed down with a crate of local beer. So began a journey that gave me a deeper understanding of the generosity, integrity, pride and strength of community amongst the Vietnamese people. Over the next couple of weeks and on subsequent return trips to the country, my new friend Bao and I explored his country together, adventuring into the hills and the farming and fishing villages in Quang Nam in particular. I fell in love with a country and its people, a place unrecognisable and distant from that portrayed in a string of dreadful war movies.
So it wasn’t pure happenstance that on a trip through London in 2002, I was drawn to a small exhibition at the British Museum of around a hundred sketches by a group of North Vietnamese war artists and soldiers it had recently acquired (published in “Vietnam Behind the Lines, Images from The War”, Jessica Harrison-Hall). These artists recorded their daily activities, portraits of friends and comrades, their heroes and their stories of life during wartime. The horrors and violence of war are largely absent in many of these works. The artists shape the way we see war. Despite the fact over 2 million Vietnamese lives were lost in conflict over a quarter of a century, the lives of the countrymen and women depicted by these artists wasn’t an endless string of military engagements, death and destruction witnessed at the cinema screen in the west, but an honest, human depiction of a way of life for these people, who fought with such determination and spirit for so long for their independence. That such a long and tragic war could imbue such creativity, sentimentality and beauty from these artists and who convey so successfully the spirit of the Vietnamese people I had discovered through my own travels, triggered a curiosity in me to seek out more of this art.
The Frontline Collection now comprises over a thousand works, mostly combat art, created in and around the battlefields in watercolour, brush or pen and ink and pencil. It also includes a number of larger works, studio lithographs, woodblock prints and oils. The Frontline Collection presents the work of over seventy Vietnamese war artists, making it one of the most significant collections of war art to exist outside Vietnam. Most works have been purchased directly from the artists, or their families and the Collection would like to thank them for generously sharing their time, their stories and their work and for being part of the Frontline Collection.