To live in Saigon is to coexist with clutter. Chaos is perhaps to be expected, when one’s habitat is a gargantuan crowded compressed narrow concretized megalopolis of over 10 million people, but few cities I’ve been to are as cluttered as Saigon.
On the ground, your shoes have to maneuver around physical clutter: parked motorbikes, styrofoam, old slippers, durian rinds, chairs, a web of random strings, wires, and plastics. In the air, the clamor of audio clutter drones on, clanking, thrumming, shrieking, yowling, and bonking away day and night.
Born and raised in Saigon, I’ve evolved to accept them, but for reasons unknown, I’ve never made peace with the city’s visual clutters: signboards, shopfronts, and posters in generic typefaces and contrasting colors of red, yellow, white, hot pink, and every hue in between. I despised them — corpulent letters that scream for our eyes’ attention in their soundless, gaudy rage.
They started popping up in the 2000s and have infected all corners of Saigon’s commercial streets, like a corrosive urban mold digesting local architecture and expelling migraine-inducing spores. I blame the advent of cheap and easily accessible printing technologies for this blight; we can print anything nowadays, but does it mean we should? At the risk of propagating yet another Saigoneer cliché, I remember a time when signage was an art and not just a means to an end: when every sign was hand-painted.
Advertising predates the age of rampant visual clutter by a good few decades, and without instantaneous prints, our parents’ generation relied on the skills and artistry of painters to adorn shopfronts. I’ve long wondered why retro signage appeals to me so much, and came to realize that it’s not the fact that it’s old, but the fact that it’s human. Humanity, unlike machines, is prone to imperfections. A little kerning inconsistency. A fatter brushstroke here and there. An irregular, cheeky twirl at the end of a “Y.” Imperfections are interesting and authentic.
Nostalgia is an ever-churning cycle. In the 2000s and 2010s, I yearned for the hand-painted goodness of the 1970s. Today, in the 2020s, I find myself strangely drawn to the kitschy clutter of the 2000s. It is increasingly exhausting to exist as a creature with eyes in the 2020s, when AI slop is cluttering every corner of our world. It is soul-draining to have to be on alert 24/7, to scrutinize every human figure’s hands, every online cat’s fur pattern, every video’s narrative logic just to detect signs of AI. And there will come a time when the technology has progressed so much that our human brains can’t tell reality from slop anymore. With the release of Dildo Banana Promax — or whatever the fuck Google is puking out these days — I fear that day is already here.
A few days ago, I was on a run and stopped at a red light. I looked up, and there, right in front of my eyes, was a signboard for a bike-fixing shop, all decked out in 2000s-style bombastic palette of red letters on yellow background. However, one letter was hanging on by a thread and the sign corners were covered in moss. And the pièce de résistance was that instead of “sửa xe” (fix bikes), the sign reads “sữa xe” (bike milk). It brought a smile to my face.
Take that, AI slop. Saigon’s visual clutter might be hideous, but it is also incredibly human. As a final act of resistance, I will start loving all shitty art from all eras and all genres, as long as a human created it. It might be shitty, but at least it is ours.
