SAIGON OPEN CITY

On the last Monday, 27^th November. All students in my DIM2 class visited Art place : Saigon open city.

When I received the email of invitation about this place, I thought that this place must be a big exhibition which is very modern, beautiful with many infrastructures. However, the fact is in contrast, when I put the first step in this place, I thought that I had come to the wrong place. It is just an old house with some simple and careless decoration. Going around, I took a look to some pictures, movie clips. However, although pictures are very interesting ,creative and strange to me, they seemed to be old, not good protection.

After that, we came to a dark room with a movie clip about the project. Honestly, in that time, I couldn’t understand obviously and exactly what is it about. I just knew that it was an art project which had been being carried out couple years before by some famous Vietnamese and foreign artists. Then, there was a discussion between the artists who carried out the project and visitor begin. At this time, I wonder : why there were some foreigners, journalists in this such bad and old place, it must have something which are strong attraction. And after that, there were some interesting questions in my mind and I became really interested in this place.

The discussion begin, the first thing made me feel surprising is that, these Vietnamese artists can speak English very well, it completely changed my thinking about artists. Before that, I thought artists are just poor people and can just drawing or doing something unusual. During the discussion time, there were many mistakes and complaints such as : not be noticed by many people, old products, late license and something else. Although there are many mistake, I had a sympathy for the organization because these problem also usually happen to other organization, for example, it usually takes a long time to get the licenses to do anything in Vietnam generally.

Art and galleries exhibition are still not noticed in the busy city such as HoChiMinh city where people are very busy with their job, just artists and people who have quite much free time love coming and concerning about them.