Art and Talent: a foreground on the 8X contemporary artists generation of Vietnam

In 2010, I produced my first publication 12 contemporary artists of Vietnam (The Gioi Publishers, Hanoi), collecting research articles on 12 leading contemporary artists of Vietnam. Then, I started to think of my own book on younger artists born in early 1980s because in 2010, most of them were turning thirty, crossing threshold of mature knowledge and personality. In other words, they are on the brink of the mature of art creativity with certain success and fame and social position. I decided to focus on artists born in the first five years of the 1980s for my convenience of research because they are in the same generation. And from now on in my book, I call them the 8X artist generation. With the above in mind, I started to observe the 8X generation’s artistic activities and to investigate their circumstances of artistic works. This 8X generation have had a more expanded environment of profession. They are completely acquainted with contemporary art and many of them actively work in this field. However, in the specialized context of Vietnamese society, Vietnamese painters, sculptors and contemporary artists have been facing quite different issues to those of their colleagues in other countries in the region and all over the world. For a quite long time now, there have been too many or even opposite viewpoints on definitions of contemporary art, of mainstream art, of professional artists in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese cultural authorities have promulgated a number of regulations in contemporary art activities which are based on superficial viewpoints completely contrary to the common practice of contemporary art in the world. On the other hand, the biggest issue is the insufficient and unstandardized legal corridor and cultural mechanism for fine arts and contemporary art in Vietnam. Many artists have discussed the passive influences of the sociocultural context to their creative motivation...