» A Soul

Throughout his artistic career, Doan Xuan Tang has spent a considerable amount of time observing and documenting North Vietnam’s mountainous landscapes and people. Instead of depicting specific characters, his portraits allude to the collective sentiments hidden behind the facade, reflecting the artist’s attempt to understand and re-interpret the inevitable modernization of ethnic life. The work A Soul thus does not fall into the common mode of aesthetics that tend to over-romanticize ethnic minorities. Woven into Tang’s broken, overlapping brushstrokes and streaks of earthy shades, we see a female character coming to the foreground who seems to have been silenced; her eyes worried and mouths shut, as if tormented by her own struggles in the face of constant change.