Thi Thanh Mai Bui

In this paper, I would like to report about the Conference and Possible Professional Outcomes after attending the CIMAM 2017 Annual Conference in Singapore. On the second day of the CIMAM 2017 annual Conference, after several speeches by professors, curators, and artists about Art and the City: From Local to Transnational? and Re-Learning Southeast Asia, I participated in the Discussion Workshops The Future of Collections. The members of the workshop are the chairman of the Discussion Workshop Suhanya Raffel, Executive Director, M+, Hong Kong and the other participants from Singapore, Germany, and Myanmar. Using the guiding questions as starting points, with Suhanya's guide, delegates were encouraged to relate their experiences and positions to the issues and to share them openly. We started the discussion very naturally talking about our institutions, sharing experience of contemporary art, and teaching each other about the knowledge of the art and the museum. Suhanya Raffel encouraged participants to speakout their thoughts, ideas as well as issues about their institutions. During the discussion, I experienced a rollercoaster of sensations. I listened to Suhanya and other participants speak about the issues and the future of the collections - museums. The discussion helped me to see the situation of the Vietnam Museum of Fine Arts in the context of Asian Museum of Arts better, strengthen my research of art and museum, and improve my lectures and writing on Vietnamese art and museum. The discussion also helped me to see clearly the strategy to develop by our museum which is: training staffs, doing academic research, making exchanges with international institutions as well as with the art institutions, art centers, researchers, artists and curators in Vietnam. Although our discussion workshops had five participants, including the chairman, we discussed very motivatedly, and we all agreed that our discussion was very interesting and helpful.

CIMAM 2017 gave me the opportunity to learn about the international issues in the latest developments in the art history, contemporary art, as well as the methodologies and approaches in studying museum of art. Our museum’s objective is to become a national center of Vietnam artwork collections that has the best reputation not only as a nation-wide art museum, but that also meets the regional and international standard in fine arts. So, I expect to further expand these relationships and cooperation with international art institutions in order to develop all fields at our museum.