Drawing Under Fire

Pham Thanh Tam, born in 1932, was, at 22, one of a handful of official war artists embedded with Vietminh troops, fighting against the French for Vietnamese independence. He studied at the Hanoi Institute of Fine Arts, which took over from the Ecole des Beaux Arts d'Indochine created by the French in 1925.

• Preface; Essay: Vietnam: From French Neo-Classicism to Socialist Realism, 1925-1946 by Jessica; Harrison-Hall, Assistant Keeper, Oriental Galleries, British Museum (pp6-15); Essay: Resistance, War and Revolution: Art for the People, 1946-1954 by Sherry Buchanan (pp16-25); Maps & Chronology of main artistic and historic events, 1945-1954 (pp26-31); Diary and Sketches by Pham Thanh Tam (pp32-217); Notes; Bibliography

"May 7, 1954, in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, was a traumatic event for the French Army.In the ranks of the Vietminh, Pham Thanh Tam, a twenty-two year-old war reporter, kept a diary of the battle. In this extremely rare diary, the propaganda does not alter the underlying emotions." - Le Nouvel Observateur '"We were young but our faces were old." In February 1954, the twenty-two year-old Pham Thanh Tam, painfully thin after seven years of conflict but still full of enthusiasm, leaves for Dien Bien Phu, wearing his sandals andrice belt. Armed only withpencils and brushes, the student of the Hanoi Fine Arts Institute, trained in French classical drawing, is attached to the Vietminh artillery division. He keeps a diary and draws in pencil, ink and watercolour what he sees during and after the battles:landscapes burnt by napalm and aerial bombings, comrades in arms, wounded and frightened or buoyed by the sayings of Uncle Ho, fire and death. If this illustrated diary is not without its ideologicalclarion calls, it is one of the rare, perhaps the only Vietminh diary of this battle. All the more credit to the American journalist Sherry Buchanan for having found and meticulously edited this accountthat ends in August 1954, when Tam returns to Hanoi. "Every fall I have the feeling that we will go to war," he writes. Ten years later, he is called upon to draw the first American plane shot down over North Vietnam. Today, Pham Thanh Tam is a retired colonel of the People's Army who lives and paints in Ho Chi Minh City." - L'Express "There is an extensive bibliography of the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the epic event that in May 1954 signalled the death knell of French Indochina. However the rarity of Vietminh contemporaneous accounts of this momentous battle makes this recently discovered diary of a twenty-two year-old soldier all the more precious. Pham ThanhTam was a student at the Hanoi FineArts institutewhen he enlisted with the artillery division as a war reporter. With his maquisards comrades, he sets off on a five hundred-kilometre trek through the punishing Tonkin jungle to Dien Bien Phu where General Navarre, commander of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, had built a French military base deemed to be impregnable. To secure the base, the 'red ants' of the Vietnam People's Army pulled their two-ton canons on marches that lasted up to twenty-hours a day, dug trenches and built underground casemates. The battle raged for fifty-five days until the surrender of the French commander General de Castries on the 7th of May. The revolutionary scribe writes,"Going up in the flames and black dense smoke of the fire were bits of parachutes and steel and wood fragments from the forts". Tam's precious diary is crammed with detail. As a revolutionary scribe, above all he records the courage of his comrades. Yet going beyond military censorship, he also expresses their sadness and suffering. The artist is ever present, showcasing his text with drawings and watercolours. Portraits of soldiers, artillerymen in action and dark landscapes of war are contrasted with bucolic scenes that he sketches elegantly between steel deluges of airpower." - Le Figaro Litteraire "In this poignant and elegant book, Pham Thanh Tam records the events of the battle of Dien Bien Phu from the Vietminh soldier's perspective. Hundreds if not thousands of books have been written on the Indochina War, the first great conflict of French de-colonisation, that lasted from 1946 to27 July 1954. The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1954 remains one of the most traumatic events in French military history. The majority of the accounts of the battle are by French veteransshocked at their defeat against a Vietminh adversary who fought for their homeland under the communist banner. Only a few rare accounts by the victorious enemy exist. This is why PhamThanhTam's diary is of such significance. When Pham ThanhTam begins hisdiary, although only twenty-two, he has already spent seven years at war.A former student of the VietBac Fine Arts College, he is named war correspondent for theartillery division (F351) of the Vietnam People's Army.He leaves for the front with some blank notebooks, a pen and a Waterman inkbottle as his weapons. The French forces believed the military base at Dien Bien Phu to be impregnable being too difficult for the Vietminh heavy artillery to reach. As the American journalist Sherry Buchanan points out in her introduction: "In order to make their way to Dien Bien Phu, the People's Army's engineerswould have to purpose-build hundreds of kilometres of roads to make way for their heavy artillery. A feat believed to be impossible by the American advisors and the French generals." Yet, against all expectations, the Vietminh built the roads. Pham ThanhTam chronicles the historic march towards Dien Bien Phu. The two-ton 105mm canons that would smashthe French garrison were pulled and hoisted up vertiginous hills, inch by inch, amidst a thousand perils. As for the dismountable canon parts, the soldiers carried them through the steep jungle terrain on their backs. The diary is illustrated with beautiful and elegant sketches and watercolours. This is a must read, for the strength of the account told without any hatred." - Le Point.fr "On May 7, 1954, after a siege of several months, the French forces at Dien Bien Phu surrendered to the Vietnam People's Army. Much has been written on this subject, yet the Vietminh accounts of the battle are extremely rare and we know little of how the conflict was viewed from the perspective of the soldiers fighting on the Vietnamese communist side. This diary, discovered by the American journalist Sherry Buchanan, is an instructive response. The author, a twenty-two year old student of the Hanoi Fine Arts Institute, was a war reporter with the Vietnam People's Army. In his diary, he records the battle and the thoughts of his fellow soldiers. Although written in the propaganda style of the day, the underlying emotions reveal the universality of suffering in war. Along with an introduction by Sherry Buchanan, this exceptional diary offers a new perspective on the French Indochina War." - Le Club Histoire "This is an extraordinary secret history by Vietnam's lost war artist. In 1954, Pham Thanh Tam kept a diary of life on the front in the war for independence. It was then hidden away until a chance meeting fifty years later." - The Independent "Pham Thanh Tam's Drawing Under Fireis an amazing book. Tam was 15 when he joined the resistance against theFrench after his home was destroyed in the 1946 French bombing of the city. Living under cover, he sketched and reported what he saw. In 1954 he covered the historic battle of Dien Bien Phu. Later, during the Vietnam War, he was an official artist throughout the Tet offensive. His is an incredible story; his illustrations and reportage are equally memorable." - The Times "Drawing Under Fire [is] a beautifully produced edition of a war diary by a young artist, Pham Thanh Tam, written and sketched during the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954). In this poetic document,discovered by Asia Ink's founder and publisher Sherry Buchanan,a young man seeks to share his dreams of beauty and love with his fellow-soldiers." - Publishing News "Drawing Under Fire is the Vietnamese equivalent of Graham Greene's The Quiet American.'A unique wartime diary, more exciting than fiction with extraordinary drawings and sketches done during the battle of Dien Bien Phu." - BBC Radio 3 Night Waves "Drawing Under Fireis a poignant and timely insight into the North Vietnamese side of the conflict." - BBC Radio Humberside "Drawing Under Fireis a unique and thoroughly fascinating diary of words, drawings and painting." - BBC Radio Jersey "Drawing Under Fireis an innovative and beautifully presented book." - BBC Radio Wiltshire Tran Trung Tin(1933 - 2009) is a Vietnamese artist of the war generation who worked entirely independently of official circles. He began as a successful young actor, but was sufficiently upset by the war and its effects, in human rather than a political way, that he was compelled to start putting his distress down in images on paper. It's impossible to know how aware he was at the time of the pre-First World War German Expressionists, but these often brilliantly coloured, tortured images seem to drop us straight back into the world of Heckel and Kirchner. - The Times Tran Trung Tin(1933 - 2009) is Vietnam's greatest artist.Over a million women served in North Vietnam's militia, and Tran Trung Tin depicted them all. Tin kept his anti-war portraits from the authorities and more than thirty years on, his paintings still have the power to shock. - The Independent A life of fighting, enforced occupation and unprecedented bombing awaited Tran Trung Tin (1933 - 2009) when he was born under French colonial rule in Vietnam in 1933. [The book and exhibition offer] a timeline of the country's twentieth century travails alongside Tin's own annihorribil - his milestones and rites of passage - charting his stint as a boy soldier in the North Vietnamese People's Army at 13 and his brief success as an actor. By the time JFK was assassinated and the US-Vietnam war was over in 1975, Tin had painted over 1,000 pictures. Surprisingly, none of them are bleeding-heart portrayals of suffering or the kind of cloying Communist propaganda found in official war art. Instead, his images are a lonely, internal journey through times of adversity. There is no celebration or bitterness, only gentle ambivalence in his ghoulishly masked figures. One faceless woman clutches a gun and cocks her head to smell a flower, while a hunched mother carries her child off into the jungle resilient but resigned. Tin's palette is informed by the muddy half-light of Viet Cong tunnels or the gloom of a blacked-out city. This sort of bleakly existential interrogation of battle is also found in post-war European war by Dubuffet or Giacometti but is rarely acknowledged in evaluations of Vietnamese culture, partly because American movies have long stereotyped their adversaries as plucky but inarticulate scrappers, never as foppish, sensitive objectors. - Time Out "This is a simply and beautifully designed book by Sherry Buchanan. Tin's work, in its simples forms and translucent washes, quiet religiosity and compassion for the outcast, brings to mind the paintings of Rouault. His abstract work is the most powerful meditative retreats of loosely painted blocks in warm colours, a self-created visual sanctuary from the war raging outside." - Modern Painters Among modern and contemporary Vietnamese artists Tran Trung Tin is indeed on the most exceptional and venerated. Tin's art represents a singular vision that possesses a fierce energy and a raw emotion that are uncommon in recent Vietnamese art. In today's freer, more open Vietnam, Tin's life has been a moving example to many of the nation's recent generation of artists. Sherry Buchanan, the author of the first monograph on Tin's work, takes a personal look at the artist's life and times in this remarkable book. - Asian Art News