Professor Sven Günther (IHAC, Northeast Normal University, Changchun) – Imperial and Post-Imperial Frames of Classicizing Iconography in Ho Chi Minh City

This paper deals with the reception of Classical antiquity in Vietnam through intermediaries. While there were only a few indirect points of contact and transfer in antiquity, “classicizing” i.e., Greek and Roman imagery, found its way to Vietnam and then Indochina through French colonial rule over the territory. In particular, French ideas of liberty, aesthetics, justice, feistiness, and prosperity and the French Republican symbol of Marianne (as an allegory of France) that embodied these ideas and virtues were written into the minds of the people in the territory through education, but also through architecture, money, and postage stamps. I shall analyze selected examples of such “classicizing” imagery in public spaces of Saigon, nowadays Ho Chi Minh City. Focus is laid not only on what messages were conveyed by the use of “classicizing” columns, sculptures, and attributes but also on how they were framed or reframed into consistent narratives, both in French colonial times and in post-colonial Vietnam, continuously mirroring communications of ideology, power, and control.