The world of Thanh Chuong’s art

Thanh Chuong is an extraordinary artist, a famed leader of Vietnam’s art world. Ever since he started drawing at age 6, Thanh Chuong’s passion and special talent have been recognized with countless awards. It can be said that art has become his way of life, his vision, and his own personal school of thought.

The artist has a highly individual and unique way of looking at the world, paired with an intelligent and flexible aesthetic sensibility. He relies mainly on line to create his images, which are filled with circles, cylinders, ovals, rectangles, triangles, cubes, and other geometric shapes as well as free-flowing lines running over and through flattened shapes. For Thanh Chuong, to paint is to play. He changes composition, turns things this way and that, and plays tricks as though he were performing in a circus. Shape and line evolve in unexpected, unimaginable ways to bring out the eccentricity, the humor, and the joy of his subject. All subjects are fair game, and he effortlessly renders them in his personal artistic “language” that is unmistakably Thanh Chuong. It is the same artistic language that he applies to his oil and lacquer works of various subjects.
Thanh Chuong’ art betrays the influence of the Western modernist movement of the early 20th century. He has admired Picasso and Matisse ever since his student days. As though he realized even at that young age the affinity between modern art’s simplification of its graphic language and tendency towards pristine primitivism with Vietnam’s own folk aesthetic. With his strong talent and individualistic style, it didn’t take long for Thanh Chuong to digest these influences and create for himself a personal artistic language. This highly sophisticated and singular style has become a brand name called Thanh Chuong, and a symbol of contemporary Vietnam.
Thanh Chuong’’s paintings include depictions of boys herding water buffalos, kites, conical hats, the moon, children, women, and his own self-portrait, among many other. Shapes intertwine with each other to create unexpected, impromptu cubist compositions. Faces lift themselves to the sky, half hidden or inclined at odd angles in a very “rustic” style filled with folk conventions, like the carved images of the Vietnamese communal halls, where long ago the artisans were often forced to fit their images onto the narrow slabs of wood. This necessity created images that were lively, humorous and unique, and ever since Vietnamese folk painting has shared this same mischievous, lopsided quality.

For his palette, Thanh Chuong likes to use bright, highly contrasting and decorative primary colors in the manner of Matisse of the Fauvists. His colors choices are jarring and bold. Colors such as vermillion, scarlet, rose, sprout-green, brilliant blue, reddish-gold, gold…all colors typically spurned and avoided by artists, and yet these are the typical colors of the traditional costumes and decorations used in the riots of color and movement that are the Vietnamese village festivals. In Vietnamese eyes, the more it “pops” the more beautiful it is.
Thus, Thanh Chuong’s painting embody a profound folk sensibility, from his subject matter to his use of color and line to his flat, conventionalized, decorative shapes. It may be said that his paintings are modern Vietnamese folk art. Thanh Chuong’s art is a bridge linking the soul of Vietnam’s folk culture to contemporary international graphic sensibilities. Although it is graphic in nature, the trend from the early 1900s until now has been to increasingly erase the distinction between graphic art and fine art; all are now simply considered art.

When speaking of bridges between Vietnamese art, with its strong folk influence, and international contemporary art, we cannot fail to mention the famous painter Nguyen Tu Nghiem, a pioneer in this work. Nghiem used many of Vietnam’s ancient artistic motifs, from the Dong Son woodblock prints to 17th century communal-hall carvings, and transformed them into a modern language. His paintings, such as Traditional Dance, Giong, and the Fairy to name a few, are suffused with pensive solemnity, the essence of the spiritual life and beliefs of people.

Thanh Chuong differs from Nguyen Tu Nghiem in that he exploits different aspects of the stuff of Vietnam’s traditional character. Rather than reflecting spiritual life, he focuses on the folksy simplicity of the every day. Thanh Chuong’s paintings are suffused with the spirit of children’s songs, rural activities, and the colors of cheerful village festivals, combined with an eye for unusual configurations, mischief, imagination, and contemporary design.

Thanh Chuong has exerted a significant influence on the generation of young artists working in the “doi moi” (renovation) era. This widespread trend back to the villages, with rustic subject matter such as water buffalos, conical hats, and children singing rendered in a naive style, owes much to the artistic language of Thanh Chuong. It would be impossible to discuss contemporary Vietnamese art without mentioning his name, for his unique style and language has made an indelible mark on Vietnamese art. Thanh Chuong is the leading contemporary folk painter in Vietnam today.

Bui Nhu Huong