Art Vietnam Honors Talented Female Artists

Art Vietnam recently took the opportunity offered by international Women’s Day to honor several female artists.

From Art Vietnam:

On this very special occasion of International Women’s Day, Art Vietnam Gallery would like to honor our very talented female artists that we have had the privilege of working with over the years and their unique, diverse works.

Each artist in her intensely personal way depicts the inner world of a woman and the struggle she must endure to keep a balance in a male dominated world.

Please join us in celebrating the lives of these wonderful unique women.

Nguyen Thi Chau Giang‘s paintings depict the inner world of one Vietnamese woman. They are private spaces which, for the most part, are never open to the public. Here one sees both the incredible joy and sadness that comes from bearing children, the loss of identity that it entails, and the cultural difficulties of dealing both with a husband and with mother-in-laws. Some of her latest works on silk, which the Singapore Art Museum owns four of, show the sense of disappointment that can stem from having too many dreams.

Her current works are from the “Dancing with the Mask” series which portrays the hardships and difficulties of being a woman in a man’s world, the struggle for personal identity and the sense of self.

She is one of seven female Vietnamese artists whose work traveled to several museums with the international exhibition “Changing Identities: Recent works by female Vietnamese artists”. An accomplished writer Chau Giang has published and received awards for her literature as well as her visual art and is considered one of the top emerging female talents in Vietnam.

Ly Tran Quynh Giang is one of Vietnam’s most unique and promising young female artists. Abandoning convention, Giang has always pursued her own unique,solitary path. Initially trained as a printmaker, she discarded this medium after making her first print.

Moving onto oil on canvas with a palette of muted blues and greens, a style reminiscent of many European impressionist painters, she imbues her canvases with an atmosphere singular to a young Vietnamese woman entrenched within her own private world, a world at times at odds with that which she is surrounded by. Her works traveled around the world in an exhibition of 7 female Vietnamese artists titled “Changing Identities.” The women in Le Tran Quynh Giang’s paintings rarely conform to traditional standards of beauty or refinement, qualities stereotypically associated with Asian woman. Instead Giang chooses to paint from her own inner life, creating pieces that are more concerned with the intellectual and emotional side of femininity in 21st century Viet Nam.

Her recent body of work of woodcuts is some of her strongest work to date.

The highly sculpted portraits provocatively stare at the viewer with an unflinching gaze. Owls, which fill the mouth, bees that swarm over the body imbue the works with an intensity from which no one can escape or ignore. The use of the complex aesthetic beauty of the owl and the bee expresses the artist’s attraction to the contradictions of life. Dark and dangerous, foreboding and frantic, the intensity of these creatures creates a calmness in her world into which she can retreat.

Nguyen Lan Huong is a quiet reflective young woman who draws her inspiration from the H’mong ethnic minorities of Northern Viet Nam. Huong lived in the high mountains with theH’mong people for many months, observing the everyday activities and nomadic lifestyle ofthis particular ethnic minority. Her well executed lacquer artworks tell the story of the H’mong people’s daily life which has not changed for hundreds of years. As one can see, much of the day is centered around music and food, a simple but meaningful infusion of work, survival, and  celebration.

Most of Huong’s pieces feature women as it is women who are central to the sustainability of the village, while the  men move ahead preparing the next site for inhabitation. The works are lively and colorful reflecting the love and connection the H’mong people feel towards natureand their peaceful, transitory lifestyle.

Nguyen Thi Chinh Le is an artist, a sculptor, and a poet. The gentleness of her soul finds its way into all different forms of expression which explore the act of meditation, as well as motherhood, of spirituality as well as domesticity. From her work an incredible gentleness emanates, tranquility fills the room in which her paintings are hung. She is one of Vietnam’s most traditional contemporary artists, and one of its most promising.

Chinh Le comes from a family of artists and is known for the versatility of her work. Works of silk, oil on canvas, lacquer, and bronze sculpture express the broad range of her talent.

The artist’s latest body of work of bronze sculptures is a series about Zen Buddhism, daily life and the trials and tribulations of being alive in today’s complicated world.

Sculpted in bronze these figures come alive as they walk across the stage of life. 

Maritta Nurmi, a Finnish artist living and working in Hanoi since 1993 is a veteran artist of the gallery. Trained as a biochemist before she became a visual artist, in Hanoi she began to study traditional Vietnamese lacquer, a technique that has informed much of her later work. Nurmi experiments with layered copper and silver leaf, as well as bright acrylic paints often burying her most expressive work beneath layers of paper thin precious metals. Her use of the gold, copper and silver leaf produces an explosive energy, which radiates off the canvas. This energy, which is produced by the rigidity of pattern counterbalanced by the interplay of the silver leaf on top of the acrylic paint, is the momentum for her journey, for climbing the mountains and being with the Gods.

The Embassy of Finland in Hanoi recently nominated artist Maritta Nurmi “Creative Person of the Year” as part of their cultural program celebrating 40 years of diplomatic relationship with Vietnam. Nurmi has lived and worked in Vietnam for 18 years. She has held nearly 20 solo exhibitions in Finland, Vietnam, Thailand, Sweden, and the United States.

Dinh Thi Tham Poong “I simply don’t see the difference between a human and a tree or a fish.”

Tham Poong’s work is whimsical and sincere. Her work is steeped in a feeling of genuine wonder. Wonder at how one survives in harsh conditions, wonder at the love that surrounds us all, wonder when experiencing the deepest silence. As Poong says, “To my mind everything has two distinct halves. A fish, for example, is half animal, half vegetal. The same is true with humans. Everything contains, holds each other, is intertwined with each other.” It is this idea of the two-fold nature of life and its simultaneous interconnectedness which plays itself out in Poong’s work. Poong combines images from her own Muong/White Thai heritage with a surrealist visual landscape imbuing her canvases -both formally and emotionally – with quality which can be described as utterly unique and completely global. Pure flights of the imagination fuse with concrete details from daily life creating canvases that work and play in the ethereal landscape of the mind.

Art Vietnam Gallery Lane 66, Number 2, Yen Lac Street Hanoi, Vietnam (Open by appointment only) Tel: 84 4 3862 3184 Fax: 84 4 3862 3185 [email protected] www.artvietnamgallery.com