At first glance, the little red scarf that Vietnamese performance artist Tran Luong is snapping through the air appears innocent enough. But for some members of his Vietnamese and Chinese audiences, it brings back memories from primary school, when they wore scarves just like it in recognition of their support for communism. Tran Luong, 47, still remembers with mixed feelings being the last boy of his class to get one—something of a worry for his parents. As the performance progresses, the Hanoi-based artist invites the audience to participate by taking the scarf and whipping his bare torso. The repeated action eventually leaves deep red imprints on his skin. "They might be timid at first, but actually when they see the red on my body, they do more, like a wild person waking up," he says, describing the reaction to "Welt," which he has performed in Beijing and Ho Chi Minh City this year. "I think the red makes people think."

And that is not something readily encouraged by the artistic censors in Vietnam. Performance art is still largely viewed as a decadent, foreign art form, far removed from the classical values of the academic beaux-arts painting style favored by Vietnam's cultural police. But in recent years, the genre has been steadily gaining ground. Because of its inherent mobility and fleeting nature—the artist needs few materials and can perform the impromptu work anywhere—Vietnamese artists have been using performance art to quietly push the boundaries of acceptable social and political commentaries while avoiding the censor's watchful eye. "As a form of expression, performance's ephemeral nature offers visibility to a wide audience but invisibility to the authorities," says Nora Taylor, the author of several books on Vietnamese art and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Indeed, censorship of the arts remains rife in Vietnam. Major art projects and exhibitions need official permits from the cultural police, and shows can be shut down with no warning. Last year an installation by Truong Tan, involving a giant diaper lined with pockets resembling those worn by traffic police officers—a reference to the absorbent pockets of corrupt officers—was abruptly removed from an exhibition at the Goethe-Institut in Hanoi. But performance art, which remains primarily "underground" in Vietnam, is much harder to control. Performances often happen without any prior advertising. Instead, artists rely on text-messaging and e-mailing a close-knit network of friends and fans who congregate at a handful of private spaces, most notably the stilt house of Nguyen Manh Duc, a longtime supporter of the art in Hanoi.

Performance art first took off in Vietnam in the mid-'90s. Tran Luong began his artistic career as an abstract painter, a member of the renowned Gang of Five, a group of young artists who rose to pre-eminence after the Communist government finally opened up in 1986. But he fell out with his peers, whose increasingly commercial works disillusioned him, and switched to conceptual performance art in the mid-1990s. Often acting as a mentor to younger artists, he is now considered one of the fathers of performance art in Hanoi, along with Truong Tan and Dao Anh Khanh.

In the last couple of years, performance artists have tried to move out of the shadows and present their works to a wider public. In 2006, Tran Luong organized the first "Dom Dom Performance Festival" in Hanoi, thanks to funding from the Denmark-Vietnam Cultural Development Exchange Fund. Twenty-two Vietnamese artists participated in that inaugural festival. Last year several artists engineered "Sneaky Week," a series of impromptu performances on the streets of Hanoi, Hué and Ho Chi Minh City. Some of the works were quite provocative; Vu Duc Toan paid for anything he needed that day using money in a sealed envelope—a commentary on the country's ongoing corruption—and captured in photos the various reactions of the people he crossed paths with.

Though they don't require a permit, street performances can quickly attract the attention of the police. "You learn how to run fast," says one artist who performed in "Sneaky Week." Dao Anh Khanh, who once actually worked for the cultural police, has stopped counting the number of run-ins he has had with them. Over the years, he has been arrested several times, some of his shows have been canceled and some of his works destroyed. When young artists sought permission to organize a new "Dom Dom Performance Festival" in Ho Chi Minh City in May, the cultural authorities asked to see advance videos of the performance work—a stretch for an experimental art form that is meant to be performed spontaneously. They are now trying to organize the festival for August, but some of the artists who had originally committed have backed out, maybe fearing the censors. At least they'll have new fuel for their art.