Hanoi College of Fine Arts

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Hanoi University of Fine Arts is an art school in Hanoi, Vietnam. It was established under the French occupation in 1925^[1]. The university has trained many of Vietnam’s leading artists and each year it participates in many cultural exchanges with sister institutions overseas.

The long and distinguished history of the Hanoi University of Fine Art may be traced back to the colonial École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de l’Indochine (1925-1945) (the Indochina College of Fine Arts) which trained successive generations of Vietnamese students in the western art tradition, laying the essential groundwork for the development of a distinctive Vietnamese style of modern art.

The college was taken over by the provisional government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam after the August Revolution of 1945, but when the struggle against the French intensified in 1950, the college was moved to Đại Từ, Thai Nguyen in the Viet Bac Resistance Zone, under the direction of painter To Ngoc Van.

In 1954 professors and students returned to Hanoi where, in 1957, a new Hanoi College of Fine Art was established under the direction of painter Tran Van Can.

In 1981 this institution became the Hanoi University of Fine Art. The University offers five-year Bachelor of Fine Art programmes and two-year full-time or three-year part-time Master of Arts programmes in Painting, Graphic Art and Sculpture, and four-year Bachelor of Fine Art Education programmes.^[2]

Bui Xuan Phai studied at the college between 1941 and 1946 and taught there for a number of years but was sacked in 1957 for supporting Nhân Văn affair a movement for political and cultural freedom. The result was that he was not permitted to show his work in public until a solo exhibition in 1984.^[3].

On May 9, 2000, the Hanoi University of Fine Arts in coordination with other local art institutions sponsored a large reunion of former students of the college to celebrate the Ecole's 75th anniversary.