Can You Ever Go Home Again or Where do the Exiled Vietnamese Emperor Ham Nghi (1871-1944)’s Paintings Belong in the Annals of Vietnamese Art History?

In 1889, at the age of 19, the Vietnamese Emperor Hàm Nghi was deported by the French colonial government to Algiers as punishment for provoking an uprising. He spent the rest of his life in exile in North Africa, periodically visiting France but never returning to Vietnam. While he was initially educated in Classical Chinese, never learned to read and write in Vietnamese and struggled to understand and speak French, he found that he could communicate through painting and spent most of his days in front of an easel. The French scholar Amandine Dabat, who is also a descendent of the Prince d’Annam, as he was known under his nom de plume, has argued that his paintings, mostly landscapes, capture his sense
of solitude and dislocation. His attire of choice, that of a Vietnamese mandarin, and the design that he chose for his house, a replica of Vietnamese imperial palaces, would confirm this assessment of him as one longing for the only “home” that he has known. But, his paintings say otherwise. Algerian pines do not fit so easily with the depictions of rural villages surrounding Hanoi that characterize much of colonial-era paintings by Vietnamese painters at this time. This paper will examine Hàm Nghi’s paintings as a starting point to address the following question in mind: Can one write an art history that accommodates the displacement of Vietnamese people ranging from the colonial period, through the American war and socialism, up to the Global present?