Cocktail alchemist and architectural artist Richie Fawcett is a Saigon bar scene personality whose name precedes him in the Vietnamese hospitality industry.
The 52-year-old moved his life to Ho Chi Minh City in 2011, head-hunted from a training ground in Hong Kong’s world-class, glitzy nightlife and bars to build a comparable cocktail scene from the clean slate of Saigon’s then-sleepy backwaters.
15 years later, the father of one has solidified his name as the architect of some of Ho Chi Minh City’s most iconic bars and restaurants, and mentor to a generation of the city’s next top bartenders. His client list runs long: bars and eateries such as Sorae, Glow Sky Bar, Mam Mam, and An An; to Wink Hotels, Intercontinental Saigon, Park Hyatt and Caravelle Saigon, among others.
Now in the fourth instalment of his storied career, we re-acquaint with Fawcett in his capacity as a full-time artist to reflect on the legacy he’s built from more than a decade of documenting change.
Re-imagining Richie the “Bartist”: Rawness cut from a lifetime of observing
The Studio Saigon is Fawcett’s personal oasis, and home to his prolific art practice.
The front room – where the drawing happens – is a wall-to-wall panoply of inked architectural sketches: cityscapes of Ho Chi Minh City over the decades, isolated scenes from a street corner that probably doesn’t exist anymore, slice-of-life tableaus depicting people and places who have since moved on.
His 5-year-old son Harry watches from a darkly inked canvas suspended above.
A dim passageway serves as the liminal space between Fawcett’s front room “artist” life and his former cocktail wizardry. We meet Anh, one of Fawcett’s earliest trained bartenders, preparing concoctions of ginger-accented cocktails for a British Consulate event amongst the milieu of accessories tucked away in the hidden backroom which once served as a private bar for invite-only guests.
Fawcett and his wife of 14 years Duyen own the Ly Tu Trong studio outright, which he says is a form of stability required for the nature of his work.
“You have to be self-sufficient if you want to do something like this. We built this place and she supports me in all the things I could do but haven’t got the time to do. So it’s about coordinating the execution of what I’m doing now, because it’s a huge risk to make a career change like this at 52 – going from cocktails into art 100 per cent,” he tells us as he deftly navigates the busy-ness of the space to make his way back out into the front studio.
“But it’s strategic, in a way, because art is always gonna be around, and cocktails are not.”
“Cocktails will always need a lot of attention, because you need to make them physically. And people are generally wishy-washy, from my experience.”
“[The food and beverage industry] is all about people – and while I love the whole thing about people – I don’t need to stand next to a picture to explain it, you know? It just explains itself.”
We are our parents’ children: Replicating childhood in our adult lives
Harry’s interspersed expeditions to the front room become a defining theme of the conversation.
Fawcett has settled atop a sturdy supply trunk for the interview – unconventional by design, but apparently effective for enabling long-term flow states. The sprawling desk is obscured by a two meter-long week-in-progress sketch of modern Ho Chi Minh City’s skyline, but if you lift up the parchment, another version of the cityscape has been imprinted into the laminate.
He tells me about the childhood which shaped his personhood, and is now shaping Harry’s.
“In many ways, I’ve almost copy-pasted my father’s story,” he says, reflecting on a childhood in quiet, medieval Suffolk surrounded by tribal paraphernalia from worlds oceans away,
“My parents were from different parts of the country, met in a different country, got married in Johannesburg in the 1950s in South Africa, right in the middle of Apartheid…I was inspired by them very early on, being completely surrounded by all this stuff from as far away as possible.”
Fawcett muses on the parallels in his story with Duyen – meeting in Vietnam in the early 2010s, falling in love in a country far away from home, and ultimately marrying in Hanoi. A University College London graduate in Egyptian Archaeology majoring in history, he credits his artistic tendencies instead to his father and grandfather.
“My father was a gunsmith – making guns, all technical and precision engineering stuff. And I used to watch him making all these guns in his workshop. I grew up in a village where there was a toy maker at the bottom of the lane. Our house was at the top, and I used to just stand there watching him, like Harry [does now].”
“Everything’s recycled again with Harry.”
“He’s having the same experience that I had when I was his age. And for me to be able to do that here in Saigon, 6000 miles away from where I had that experience is… sometimes I have to pinch myself, you know?”
We watch as Harry bounces into the room, parading a sketch rendered in black and red marker with a curiosity and play reflective of the environment.
Documenting 15 years of Saigon: Change is the only constant – don’t be too nostalgic about it
Fawcett recalls the initial loneliness – no regrets – of moving to Saigon in 2011, recalling a scene from his 20th floor apartment in The Manor overlooking a view of a much sparser skyline.
“I think I cried once, and I’m not ashamed at all. These emotions come out when you’re so far away from where you come from. But that was the idea: to get as far away from where I came from as possible. England for me was over and done.”
“So 15 years – so much changes in a country, but also for you inside as a person as well. I’ve changed, the city’s changed, everything’s changing. If you can embrace that change is the only constant and don’t be too nostalgic about it, you can keep moving.”
We’re now poring over a stack of leather-protected originals from his early work documenting Saigon as it then was – priceless pieces which have since been published in his HCMC Decacity Project: 2013–2023. He’s laboriously catalogued more than a decade of sketches, and points out the evolution of his style over time – and the fact that nostalgia doesn’t have a place in his documentary work. He draws contrasts between long-term friend and fellow Saigon documentary photographer Alexandre Garel, suggesting emotion matters less when your function is to record.
“I don’t really feel nostalgic about my earlier works…Your work today is just a moment in a natural process that’s going to be a memory for you later.”
“This is a visual diary for the last 10 years – that’s the whole point. [Alex] is more emotional than I am. I don’t really care, because it’s your country – you do need to change. You need to make room for business, to develop.”
He notes the shared urgency with which he and Garel took to their respective crafts to document an urban landscape which was beginning to experience rapid development in the mid-2010s.
“I drew everything as quickly as possible because I knew [the infrastructure] was going to go. Same as Alex. We used to meet each other on the street for years.”
“From 2015, the city changed so quickly that I couldn’t draw quick enough. I knew it was coming.”
Legacy arrives in the quiet of disappearance
Fawcett’s recollections of the people, places and stories he’s captured seems forensic. For a character so well-known in Vietnam’s bar and hospitality scene, his preference for interiority is telling – and the absence reveals itself in his work.
"I invested my life in the drawing process, so it's such a strong memory for me...to actually spend time sitting and being a part of the street. That moment where you disappear and people don't see you anymore: that's what I've always looked for."
“You need to spend time in the place, being a part of the scene to disappear. I apply that to drawing and it works every time.”
He reflects on the body of work he’s amassed, and his ultimate end goal of selling the entire collection of originals and full-scale sketches canvassing his more-than-decade-long career to a museum or private auction house as his contribution to the historical documentation of Saigon’s evolution.
“All of this is legacy, you see? Legacy means I’ve done something useful in my life. Because 10 years go by in the blink of an eye…and you can’t get time back – it’s a one-way street.”
“Legacy is actually a very natural thing – if you’re pushing too hard, it won’t happen. But it takes a lifetime of experiences to get to the point where all the dots join up. If the path disappears, then you’re on the right path.”
