the disappearing street signs of vietnam: the new generation capturing a vision of days gone by
In early 2019 I visited Vietnam. It was my first time travelling there without my family, and so the first time I was able to explore the country on my own terms. Wandering the streets of Ho Chi Minh I began to notice these fading signs – written in a language I didn’t speak but so obviously beautiful I couldn’t help but stop to admire them. Once I had noticed the first, I began to see these vintage street signs everywhere. Wedged between luxury car dealerships or perched atop old houses, these signs represented a Vietnam that I had never experienced. My camera roll reflected this fascination – tiles of interspersed with shots of food and sweaty selfies. Some were hand painted onto rusty zinc boards, others were carved into wood, and others were sculpted from stone. Each stood in stark contrast to the rapidly urbanising world around them.
In a rapidly developing country, Vietnam’s hand painted signs stand in stark contrast to the world around them. Today, factory made signs are the norm. Quicker and cheaper to produce these manmade signs dwarf the handwritten iterations of their predecessors, but older signs can still be found if one looks closely enough. Cursive, bold, serif, sans serif, tails that curve to the left, accents that slope this way and that - each sign carries its own idiosyncrasies and quirks. Identifying the variations in type provides all kinds of insight into the personality of the maker and the cultural influences of the time from China, America, or France. Only one street sign painter remains today, 67-year-old Nguyen The Minh who continues to create each piece painstakingly by hand in his signature lettering.
A longing for a disappearing past has spawned various research projects amongst academics and Vietnam’s youth culture. On social media, the hashtag #thelosttypevietnam aggregates user images of old street signs spotted across Vietnam, and accounts like @daysoffuturepast also collect images. Luu Chu (The Lost Type Vietnam Project), is a research collective that preserves images of old Vietnamese type. Melbourne-based graphic designer Thy Hà is a frequent contributor to Luu Chu and has also worked on her own fonts that pay homage to the fading tradition of Vietnamese calligraphy. Scholars at RMIT Vietnam held an exhibition in 2019 that documented Hanoi’s hand-painted signs and French Photographer Brice Coutagne has set about creating an archive of disappearing fonts in Saigon’s famous Binh Tay Market.
My mum’s handwriting reflects this typographic tradition. She was schooled in a generation that taught students to take pride in their writing, penning their essays in perfectly formed glyphs that all looked the same. This was a tradition that began to be realised in my own handwriting before being quickly stamped out once I started school in Australia. I suspect that this is where my fascination with vintage street signs stems from. They’re a window into a world my mum once inhabited, one that still courses through her veins, and manifests itself on the pages she writes.