Curator’s Introduction

Arts of Ancient Viet Nam: From River Plain to Open Sea

This exhibition brings together more than one hundred objects from ten museums across the diverse geographic expanse that is Viet Nam to illuminate the country’s long history of cultural and economic exchange.  Most of the works on view in Arts of Ancient Viet Nam have never been shown in the United States, and many were unearthed in excavations over the last few decades. Although in the planning stages for over twenty years, the exhibition became possible only after the normalization of relations between Viet Nam and the United States in 1995.

Viet Nam’s coastline extends 2133 miles from north to south; mountains create its western border, while its eastern coastline links with China in the north and insular Southeast Asia to the south. Viet Nam’s complex river system and its long, continuous coastline enabled its role as a vibrant crossroads of trade for commodities arriving from ever-increasing distances.

Enlarge

Archeological evidence has uncovered a Southeast Asian trading system that dates to at least the second millennium BCE. The broad distribution of bronze drums created by the early culture of Dong Son and the Sa Huynh culture’s jewelry found outside Viet Nam support Viet Nam’s important position in this early interchange. By the beginning of the Common Era, it is clear that Viet Nam also conducted regular exchange with India and China. Along with the advantages of these commercial transactions came the exchange of both technologies and ideas and beliefs, including concepts of statecraft and the introduction of foreign religions.

The metal, ceramic, and stone objects in this exhibition, which date from the first millennium BCE through the seventeenth century, combine unique Vietnamese characteristics with the iconography and decorative motifs that resulted from cultural interaction. The four sections of the exhibition explore the varying roles of trade and cultural exchange in the early cultures of Dong Son in the north and Sa Huynh in central and southern Viet Nam; the trading cities of Fu Nan; the polities of Champa; and the port city of Hoi An.

The name Viet Nam is composed from the two words viet, which means people, and nam, which means south. In the second half of the twentieth century, the country came to be frequently referred to as Vietnam in the West. In recent years the original Vietnamese spelling has been used by the United Nations and increasingly in scholarship.

Nancy Tingley.

A full-color, 356-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Available at AsiaStore.