Hanoian Vũ Dân Tân (1946 - 2009), already experimenting with novel expressive modes in the 1970, was among a handful of Hanoi artists who drove Vietnam’s contemporary art turn in the early-1990s. Producing multimedia and multi-disciplinary works, Vũ Dân Tân seized the zeitgeist of Vietnam as in the mid-1980s, the country transitioned as among the poorest in the world to become a lower middle-income nation by the late-1990s. Among the first Vietnamese artists to join international contemporary art exhibition, in 1996 Vũ Dân Tân participated in the 2nd Art Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art. In 1990s and 2000s, Vũ Dân Tân developed a conceptually-underpinned practice that deployed unorthodox materials, high-low art methods, word-play and cultural appropriations exemplifies in series such as Money and Fashion. Money, developed over a decade, 1993-2003, evokes money as form and idea. Money (currency Hong Kong dollars), featuring icons from global culture and history substituted for state mascots, offers a witty subversion of real money, the engine of capitalist consumerism in our gloialased 21st century. Fashion (2000-2009), made with recuperated, cut-out cardboard, and here stamped with Vũ Dân Tân’s self-portraits, through the beauty of hand-made, and references to fashion and cabaret-type sexuality as international commodities, humorously interrogates the philosophical and ethical transformations of globalising Vietnam and Asia.