Considering Vietnam's modern history, it is hardly surprising that about a third of the exhibits in "50 years of Modern Vietnamese Paintings: 1925-75" at Tokyo Station Gallery depict warfare and soldiers in uniform, or are propaganda images fashioned from the odds and ends of figurative painting. Here, the art is very much a mirror reflecting national experience and history.
Vietnam had virtually no tradition of painting before France's colonial rule began. The introduction of Western painting initially resulted in modernistic bourgeois scenes that mingled international techniques and Vietnamese subject matter.
Such images soon gave way to war representations, as anti-French sentiment began to dominate cultural life. Then, from the explicit patriotism embodied in these works, Vietnamese art moved to government-sponsored Social Realism representing the local communist ideologies that took root in the mid-20th century.