Trekking through the forest with hardened front line soldiers and living under the threat of American bombers: it’s not the normal experience for art school students, but it was one faced by hundreds in Vietnam during the country’s conflicts that raged between 1954 and 1975. From post-colonial struggles to the battles to reunify a Vietnam partitioned after the 1954 Geneva Accords, North Vietnamese artists were key in taking the messages of Ho Chi Minh to the front line of battle and to a population across both sides of the divide. Visually arresting, cheap and effective, Vietnamese propaganda posters weren’t meant to last, but their messages were.
