Nguyen thai tuan biography examples

Nguyen Thai Tuan (1965–2023, Vietnam) graduated from the Hue University College of Arts in 1987 and was one of Vietnam’s most significant artists of his generation, whose artistic practice was anchored in the symmetry of fullness and absence.

We all got out alive luckily, and things took a turn amidst the most difficult years.

After 1975, my mother was allowed to continue teaching, but father was forced to ‘education’ for a few months. Although he wasn't allowed to teach after liberation, still he embodied the qualities and values of an educator.

And it will be, of an everlasting obssession.

Nguyễn Thái Tuấn's sketch of his father - Nguyễn Nguyên

(pen name: Nguyễn Thảo Nguyên)

Solo exhibitions (selection):

2022

S.E.A. My maternal grandparents were merchants, and my parents were teachers at elementary and secondary schools in the province.

After the three major events occurred, most of my family's collection of books and documents were either burnt or lost. The house remained this time but all else was lost. At the time I simutaneously attended school and followed her for work, and to say she was the most influential person throughout my life wouldn’t be further from the truth.

Both my parents were teachers, and was never involved with any political affairs.

He got captured and killed when my father was only three, so raise him grandmother did by herself. The place suits me, who has forever preferred a life of quiescence, peace, and simplicity with minimum social interaction. It was horrific, the days at sea, Saigon was liberated as soon as we set foot on land when we then had to find a way to return home.

I inherited a slight fond of art from my parents, especially the passion for reading from father. The human condition pertetually haunts and conjures itself in my paintings...

For Thai Tuan, the relationship between space and objects, and body and matter, was of unquestionable importance.

In the monograph on Nguyen Thai Tuan, the Italian art critic Demetrio Paparoni states: “Against the backdrop of Nguyen Thai Tuan’s paintings there is always Vietnam, with its symbolic places and its history.

I then had to graduate middle-school in 1987 and went to make a living in Da Lat, while also pursuing my passion for painting there.

Da Lat is a city in the highlands of Southern Central with diaphanous weather and pleasant locals, life wasn’t as bustling and hustled as many other cities. Accordingly, Nguyen Thai Tuan’s interest is directed towards the behaviors and the existential dynamics of both those who induce these events and those who endure them.

In remarking that current condition as the result of the sedimentation of historical events and happenings, Nguyen Thai Tuan intermingles the past and the present, rendering the painting a critical space in which his reflections take shape.”

Nguyen Thai Tuan held many solo exhibitions worldwide, including Interior & Black Souls, Virtual Exhibition, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy, 2021; Black painting, Primae Noctis Art Gallery, Lugano, Switzerland, 2015; Heritage, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy, 2014; Fullness of Absence, San Art, HCMC, Vietnam, 2011; Black Painting, San Art, HCMC, Vietnam, 2008; and Black Painting, New Discovery, SH Contemporary, Shanghai, China, 2008.

but only pain, bereavement, and desolation...

And the imposing act of any ideology will all be of happening maleficence...

Still to this day, having gone through several opus eras, yet the humanist philosophy constantly remained a thread to all my works. He never even held a gun, not to mention using it.

First, it was the ‘Tet Offensive’ (Tết Mậu Thân) in 1968 when my whole family had to evacuate to find shelter. Life had just begun re-establishing in 1975 when came the Liberation of the South. Our entire livelihood largely depended on my grandmother, and a few orchards from the fields and gardens since parents' didn’t have much income.