Decacity – 10 Years of Pen & Ink in Vietnam

Arriving in Vietnam in 2011 to set up a cocktail bar and lounge straight from the then bustling nightlife and finance driven city of Hong Kong, I found myself in a sleepy mega city called Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon, the one time Pearl of the Orient, and Jewel in the Far East French colonial crown for 100 years up until the mid 1950’s, when the Americans took over until the mid 1970’s. From then on, until the early 1990’s the country was effectively shut off from the outside world, pressing the Pause button on cities like HCMC, when the rest of the world was developing at a ferocious pace.

Trapped in its own time capsule, time stood still here for almost two decades, inadvertently preserving much of the original colonial buildings and keeping the same street plan made by the French, only to be renamed up to Five times since the first roads where christened to the present day.

Immortalized and romanticized in Graham Greenes classic “The Quiet American”, set during the death throes of the French regime in 1955 after their defeat in Dien Bien Phu, latter day Saigon went on to become the focus of the world’s attention during the next two decades with the final foreign occupation by the Americans up until 1973 and the final reunification of the country in 1975. Written in The Continental Hotel, Graham Greenes room was 214, a room you can stay in today.

Fast forward 36 years from the final victory, I entered Saigon to set out on my own mission to set up and run bars and restaurants, almost immediately realizing that I was actually in a city where time had stood still for over a quarter of a century.

With my background in history, specifically archaeology, and having had a career in London as a freelance photographer, I wanted to find a way to capture the beauty of the city that would be more of a challenge than just clicking a button and taking a photograph, that was challenge taken up by my future good friend Alexander Garel ( more about him later ), so I turned to drawing, after not having picked up a pen since my university years, at that point, early 2012, I set about to record the streets, people, buildings and views of a city that I had already fallen in love with.

Using my childhood gift of drawing, later used in my degree for museum artifact drawing, effectively, I had inadvertently given myself the challenge to make a sketch documentary of the changing face of HCMC, but didn’t realize until 4 years later that I was actually on to something…except it was in very, very slow motion.

To keep things on track I continued my first reason for coming and that was to set up bars and restaurants, heading up a few well know rooftop restaurants and bars when they were all the rage, eventually leading me to set up my own gallery and private bar “ The Studio Saigon”, which is where I continue to create art and cocktails to this day.

For years the f and b market was a shadow of what it is today and as a result I found time on my hands to create the drawings of the city that I present to you in this boo. Days would run into days, into weeks into months into years, where I’d be drawing in between lunch and dinner services, always with the thought in the back of my mind that time is running out…

and it was…

By 2015 the past time of drawing turned into a frantic mission to capture the essence of the original city that was rapidly being transformed from low rise colonial shop houses and villas to multi-story glass, steel and concrete towers which were popping up across the skyline at an astonishing rate.

I’m not an activist in the sense that I lament the loss of the old buildings, on the contrary, change is inevitable, the city needs to reinvent itself and although some historical landmarks have been lost forever, I was aware of this happening at the time I was there and used my energy to capture these buildings in pen and ink instead of complaining that they were about to be demolished.

I guarantee in the same way that the great cities of Uruk and Ur in ancient Mesopotamia stood grand, then we’re laid waste, only to be written about in poetic lament, the same will be said of the destruction of the glass towers that are popping up in this third transformation of the city I have illustrated.

First it was a Cham fishing Village surrounded by marsh, coconut and banana groves, then the French arrived. Setting out the second transformation we are now with witnessing the third phase of transition, from out of date buildings to new glass towers…what will be the fourth?

Revert back to the first? Will sea levels in the future turn the city into a water world with water levels upto the first 3 stories of skyscrapers, where streets become canals (again), and car parks become boat parks ? Will the city revert back to fishing…being a fishing city this time not a village?

I can’t answer these questions, but I can show you what I’ve drawn over the last 10 years showing the latest transition of the once Pearl of the Orient, and I know you will like seeing these sketches.

Thank you for your interest in my work and please enjoy this book as much as I have enjoyed creating it over the last decade.