Thanh Chuong (b.1949) is a famous painter and a master in Vietnam’s contemporary painting art. A child prodigy of painting, he started his career at the age of 7. over a half-century of art creation and contribution, he has produced a vast number of artworks, from sketches, and sculptures, to pastel paintings, oil paintings, and especially lacquer paintings.

Since the start of Đổi Mới (Renovation) (1986), he became one of the favorite painters because his paintings are a perfect mixture of Vietnamese fine art identities and the world’s contemporary language. This became a strong characteristic style in his paintings, which he calls “contemporary folk”. He is a pioneer painter who has a great influence on younger colleagues by always placing importance on the preservation of national identities in creative activities. His works have appeared in a lot of European, Asian, and American countries.

In 2001, he has the first Vietnamese painter whose artwork (Tình Yêu – Love) was selected by the United Nations for an internationally-circulated stamp on the anniversary of the International Year of Volunteers, introducing a Vietnamese painter’s name to the list of world-famous painters in the UN’s stamp collection.

His art creation is also reflected in the structure called Việt Phủ Thành Chương (Thanh Chuong Viet Palace), a vivid and unique international-level cultural complex, unprecedented in terms of scale, cultural value, and protection of national culture. He currently lives and works in Hanoi.

A spotlight in contemporary Vietnamese art.

(Artist Pham Binh Chuong)

The open-door period was a good chance for Vietnamese painting to be known by the outside world. The generation of Indochinese College graduates has already become the past while the socialist has not ripened, so what do we have apart from traditional folk paintings? Thành Chương, with his keenness and outstanding talent, has made full use of the available values of that heritage, developed a different outlook, and become a star in contemporary Vietnamese painting art. With such familiar themes as countryside children and buffaloes, he created a difference in modeling healthy characters and a modern palette. Have you thought that lotus-petal pink and banana-bud green could be used in lacquer paint? He has exploited them so artfully that nobody feels that his paintings are dazzling. Conversely, they are very “ok”. In fact, after that cheerful and spontaneous appearance is an entire system of color theories that can be explained by people of great learning. Thành Chương is a master of using supplementary colors in his paintings, not to mention his ability to produce plentiful materials. In the method of depiction, all shapes and masses are “restructured” and laminated with completely different pivots. The most popular image, perhaps, is a child’s head looking skywards as if it is “stacked” directly to the character’s back (rotated 180 degrees from the neck pivot). In my opinion, that detail may be influenced by two schools: Đông Hồ folk paintings, and the Cubism, both of which are developed to extremes by Thành Chương.

Besides, his paintings have a very special characteristic that not everyone can recognize, and dares not to do the same. It is the rule-breaking layout with the so-called violative element: “tangential shapes” (shapes touching each other, for example, a moon appears on a buffalo, with the most curved point touching the animal’s spine), or “coincidental lines” (lines linking together, for example, a character’s conical hat links to the next taught in professional fine art schools because they are considered disordered, complicated and unclear in layers… is it true that he is raising difficulties for himself, or he is too compliant? No, looking at the overall, we can realize his intention: successive tangential and adjacent images help to form a close and harmonious structure, with shapes following shapes in a flexible and highly rhythmic manner. On that base, in combination with skillful use of materials and colors, his paintings are so charming to viewers.