Nguyen Thuy Hang
Nguyen Thuy Hang (b. 1978, Saigon, Vietnam) graduated from the HCMC University of Fine Arts. Her works often combine various art and forms: large scale sculptural installation and contemporary dance, cinema, fine arts, and music. She is one of the most outstanding artists from the post-war generation, both in the fields of literature and visual arts in Vietnam.
Despite growing up and sharing the common experience of “post-war” Vietnam with others in her generation, Nguyen Thuy Hang nonetheless remains peerless in her practice. She hones her skills as an ambidextrous player in both literature and the visual arts, balancing herself on a tightrope as she gives her whole heart and mind to both forms of expression. Her paintings and sculptures exalt sentiments already imbued in her writing, and her short stories generate imaginative spaces where her visual arts can take on more cryptic and phantasmagorical shapes through text. Drawing from her wealth of experiences from seemingly incongruous milieux (educated in the Fine Arts University of the South, living and practicing for a few years in the US, then advancing her career in the North, before returning to HCMC), Nguyen Thuy Hang diverges from the predominant style of socialist realism in Vietnam and tackle hidden taboos in a society still reeling and healing from past wounds.
Her literary publications have appeared in prestigious literary journals Kill Your Darlings (Australia), diaCRITIC (USA), Vagabond Press (Australia), Han Nefkens Foundation (Spain) and are held in the collection of the Hong Kong Library Museum-Taiwan Contemporary Art Museum. She has also held numerous exhibitions and art talks at home and internationally, including In absence, presence, Nguyen Art Foundation, HCMC, Vietnam, 2024; Land(e)scape, Galerie BAQ, Paris, France, 2023; My Life as a Fictional Story, KB Art House, Simrishamn, Sweden, 2019; and Dew Drips, Smog Sips, Vin Gallery, HCMC, Vietnam, 2019. Her works are held in various private collections in Vietnam and abroad.
(Artist biography courtesy Hung M. Duong )