» Potato’s Portrait 2

In the Potato’s Portrait series, Le Hoang Bich Phuong draws a quiet yet incisive parallel between natural and human cycles of desire, growth, and decay. Through the humble motif of the potato – a staple crop embedded in histories of sustenance, colonization, and survival – the artist constructs a metaphor for human ambition and its moral entanglements. 
 
The soil, rendered as a corporeal ground of being, becomes both a site of nourishment and contamination. Within it, the potato germinates as a dream: latent, aspirational, and filled with potential. Yet, as Phuong suggests, unchecked growth leads to transformation – nutrients turn toxic, abundance becomes excess, and the dream, once generative, begins to decay. The same ground that nurtures life also enables its corruption. 
 
Executed in her distinctive silk painting technique that merges the restraint of traditional Vietnamese and Japanese aesthetics with a surreal, psychological charge, the Potato’s Portrait series reflects Phuong’s ongoing investigation into the porous boundary between the material and the spiritual, the organic and the human. Beneath its gentle surface lies a meditation on the cyclical nature of desire – how vitality and decay coexist within the same pulse of life.