Vu Dan Tan Museum, Hanoi, is proud to announce its Inaugural Exhibition Vu Dan Tan Citizen of the World — Forging Contemporary Art in 1990s Hanoi , a landmark exhibition celebrating the pioneering Vietnamese artist whose experimental vision helped shape the emergence of contemporary art in 1990s Vietnam, a decade of profound social and cultural transformation as the country globalised in the wake of 1986 economic reform (doi moi).

Vũ Dân Tân (1946-2009) was a well-known figure in Hanoi, the city of his birth where he worked much of his life. From the 1970s, departing local painting orthodoxies, he produced novel images and forms that would foreground his 1990s conceptually-underpinned multimedia and pluridisciplinary expressive breakthroughs. These included installation series Suitcases of a Pilgrim , first shown internationally at the 1996 Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT2), Queensland Art Gallery, Australia; and his performative installation with a 1961 Cadillac, Cadillac/Icarus , from RienCarNation , unveiled in 1999 at Pacific Bridge, Oakland, California, then transported to Hanoi in 2000. In addition to these two seminal bodies of works, Vu Dan Tan Citizen of the World presents other key career series of the 1990s-2000s, Vu Dan Tan’s Money , Fashion , Amazon , and Festival Banners . Curated by Vu Dan Tan specialist and art historian of Southeast Asian contemporary art Iola Lenzi, Vu Dan Tan Citizen of the World also includes rare, early-career works on paper from the 1970s, archival documents, films, and performance relics framing the major paintings and installations that define Vu Dan Tan’s artistic legacy as a trailblazer of contemporary art in Vietnam.