Seen in Saigon

In Saigon, I encountered mass produced art on a scale I have seldom seen before. On all our travels, we (my travelling companion and I), usually buy something by a local artist. It's not what we set out to do, but something usually catches his eye or mine and then we buy it and wrap it with much care and cart it back home so it can find its rightful place on some wall in our house. The only thing we bought this time was a print of an old propaganda poster from the war. My eyes are drawn to tourist art for its mawkish sentimentality and also because it tells you what the mood of a place is, what its gearing up for.
In Vietnam, the mood is commerce. What sells, multiplies. So, yes there were many portraits of women in cone-shaped straw hats. That's fine. What wasn't fine were portraits of Vietnamese women --all the same except for different background colours--I guess you were meant to choose whatever would go with your colour of wall of furniture. Even stranger were the copies of Western artists which seemed almost to outnumber the hats and women--hundreds of copies of Klimt's The Kiss, Botero's rotund women and anything else that has ever graced a museum. Maybe we were looking in the wrong places or even the wrong city, because Hanoi is said to be a city teeming with original, contemporary Vietnamese art with its unique European influences. Apart from a cathedral and a post office, Saigon's city centre is rapidly giving way to the standard issue glass-chrome-steel high rise.
The main shopping area, Dong Khoi, is a snarl of silk and lacquer, the new malls flash the names Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Cavalli at you. Inside, uniformed and delicately-featured salesgirls look flustered as a man in a British accent, slows down his speech and asks for trousers in a "b i g g e r" size. So, here it is the new Vietnam and its open for business, just like anywhere else.