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Đổi Mới reforms triggered significant changes in the Vietnamese art world, including new institutional spaces, platforms for critical discourse, and growing artistic mobility. However, it is important to question the ways in which the use of Đổi Mới as a blanket indicator of artistic reform has further constructed a homogeneous representation of "Vietnamese contemporary art." The authors consider the relationship of Đổi Mới to the "globalization" of Vietnamese art with attention to questions of art historiography (the coining of such terms as "post-Đổi Mới Vietnamese art") and variations in regional developments (positing local art histories against the national narrative).

This essay examines the unprecedented rise during Đổi Mới [Renovation] of a legal-literary discourse that brought about, for the first time, the socialist legal subject in Vietnamese literature. It also analyzes Dương Thu Hương's Những Thiên Đường Mù [Paradise of the Blind] (1988), a novel that occupies the very center of Renovation politics for the way it imagines the 1950s land reform in North Vietnam as the foundational moment for the emergence of the socialist legal subject.