VIDEO: Chats With Specialists - Raquelle Azran Vietnamese Contemporary Fine Art
VIDEO: In Conversation With Raquelle Azran
VIDEO: Raquelle Azran on How to Hang Artwork in your Home
Raquelle Azran is a collector and museum curator specializing (since 1991) in Contemporary Vietnamese Fine Art. Museum exhibitions include the Wilfrid Museum, Israel (2002, 2005) and the National Fine Arts Museum, Vietnam (2007). Her 2007 London Bankside exhibition, Of This and Other Worlds, was featured in the Times, The Guardian, and ARTnews. Her 2013 show, Worlds of Paper and Wood, was featured in Artinfo and in the Asian Art in London V and A museum gala. Works from her collection are on loan to international museums, and she acts as a consultant to embassies, collectors, and corporate clients.
A first encounter with Vietnamese paintings evokes surprise as well as delight. Familiar media—oil, gouache, and watercolor—join with distinctly Asian motifs and spatial concepts. This unique blend of Eastern and Western sensitivities began in 1925 with the founding of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Hanoi by the French artist Victor Tardieu, and has continued to inspire the Vietnamese aesthetic tradition. Stylistic elements of Impressionism, Expressionism, Figurative Art, Cubism, and Fauvism intermingle with purely traditional Vietnamese themes of emotional experiences and spiritual values as represented by the village, the buffalo, and the ancient dances. The juxtaposition of handmade rice paper and traditional lacquer painting with contemporary artistic techniques bridges past, present, and future, and spans the cultural divide of East and West.
Vietnamese Art is defined by its brimming vitality, lush colors, and directness, as well as by its poetic, dreamlike meditativeness. Depending upon the personal message of the artist, the spectator is invited to share in nostalgic memories of the past or to enter a fantasy world of stylized imagery. Never confrontational or aggressive, Vietnamese Art is a lyrical, serene and intriguing moment of beauty in time.
The following are descriptions of artists' styles; click on each artist's name to view images and access biographical data.
Dang Thao Ngoc: Ngoc paints her view of the world, and especially of women's place in the world, in vivid oils on canvas. Her imagery draws on traditional Vietnamese iconography as well as Contemporary urban icons to highlight global concerns. An abundance of materials yet feelings of loneliness—the juxtaposition is visually arresting and thought provoking, as are the subjects of Ngoc's scrutiny.
Dinh Hanh: Hanh juxtaposes the ancient technique of multi-layered lacquer on wood with uniquely modern representations of the female form. Using the most delicate of line and contour, Hanh beguiles us with glowing images that are both universal and timeless.
Dinh Thi Tham Poong: Poong, a Vietnamese woman of Thai and H'mong hill tribe descent, vividly captures on rice paper her concerns and emotions with the contemporary world. Women and nature intermingle and merge in scenes simultaneously real and surreal.
Hoàng Tích Chù, a member of the first generation of modernist painters in Vietnam, is renowned for his mastery of lacquer painting. Expanding upon the existing palette of brown, black and red, Chù helped to develop new colors and textures from raw materials, including crushed and inlaid eggshells, gold leaf, silver powder and powdered rubies. His paintings with his wife as model exemplify the fusion of French modernism with Vietnamese traditional technique.
Le Anh Quan: A member of the EXIT group of young artists in Hanoi, Quan generously applies vivid colors and exuberant images to oil and acrylic on canvas. His world is magnanimous, peopled by abstract figures expressing Quan's perceptions and emotions of the individual in a changing world.
La Ba Quan: With a discerning eye and dispassionate hand, Quan paints the men on the street and in the cafes of Hanoi. His subjects are captured and strikingly impastoed, in the spirit of Berlin avant-garde art of the 1920s.
Le Trieu Dien: Described as one of the most promising painters in the Mekong Delta, Dien combines a purity of line with the splendor of color, evoking the illusory rhythms of seduction. He invites the viewer to be enveloped in the multi-layered reality of a dynamic sensation.
Luu Cong Nhan: A member of Vietnam's generation of senior artists, Nhan's paintings encompass the drama of his country's struggles for independence, as well as the gentleness and universality of the female nude. Working in oils, gouache, and ink, Nhan has echoed Vietnam's passage through time, from early Impressionism through Socialist Realism to the unique blend of East and West.
Mai Dac Linh: Linh dedicates his art, both paintings and graphics, to the ethnic minority people of Vietnam. Using ink, natural pigments, and medium on the very thinnest of rice paper, he recreates in his own, very personal style the daily lives and landscapes of his country.
Victor Francisco Hernández Mora: Mora works in mixed media on paper, utilizing collage and drawing. His chosen material is recycled paper, in the tradition of 'ready made'. Mora's art is whimsically figurative. His naive childlike images express both gravity and hope, a reflection of cautious optimism.
Ngo Van Duyen: In lyrical ink drawings and gouache paintings, Duyen chronicles the people and landscapes of Vietnam, beginning in the 1960s during wartime and continuing up through the present.
Nguyen Bao Toan: Combining a deceptively simplistic secular folk aesthetic with the sophistication of simile and metaphor, Toan's City mandarin envelops us within the solicitude and warm humanity of the countryside.
Nguyen Quang Minh: Minh's paintings embody the essence of Vietnamese grace. His works breathe a metaphor of innocence. The tranquility of minimalism, the elusive figurativeness, the generosity of quiet space—all these are captured in the small moments of Minh's works.
Nguyen Tuan Cuong: Living in the town of Sapa among hill tribes and ethnic minorities, Cuong richly celebrates village life and its ceremonies in dense outpourings of Fauvist colors and unbridled imagery.
Nguyen Sy Bach: Weaving fantastic, dreamlike scenes of flora and fauna, Bach invites us into his private world of abstract yet embodied art. The shimmer of seashells and of translucence lures the viewer into a dimension of immense purity, from which detachment is not an option.
Nguyen Thanh Son: Using the traditional Vietnamese medium of woodblock printing on rice paper, Son celebrates cultural rites and traditions. His stylized figures are ethereal, inhabiting temporal spheres of past, present, and future. Whether waiting for a lover, or offering fertility prayers, Son's subjects resonate with the fascination of other worlds.
Nguyen Thi Phuc: Phuc chooses to focus on the genre of still life. Her paintings of flowers are lush and atmospheric, inspired by European Classicism and enriched with undertones of the East.
Nguyen Tu Nghiem: Nghiem, the last of the three founding fathers of Contemporary Vietnamese Fine Art, has been described by the art critic Nguyen Quan as "a historic consciousness in terms of painting." A master painter, Nghiem resurrected ancient village artistic traditions and recreated them in a uniquely Vietnamese contemporary sensibility. Combining a naive aesthetic of Primitive Art with technical mastery of medium and form, in the spirit of Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Picasso, Nghiem has created a simplicity so multi-layered yet so universal that his art speaks with the beauty and integrity of truth.
Ninh Thi Den: Den has turned from sculpture to collage to express her ideas of the world. Following in the footsteps of Picasso and Malevitch, Den works with paper and gouache to achieve volume and depth in her depictions of hill tribes in the Highlands of Vietnam.
Pham Thang Long: Long's minimalist canvases shimmer with geometric forms hinting at reality. His paintings echo the duality of life: simplicity and richness, dreaminess and worldliness, innocence and maturity. Long's work is a paradox of geometric design bathed in pure rhythm.
Pham Viet Hong Lam: The first green painter in Vietnam. Lam expresses his passion for life by painting rural village scenery in unexpected and extraordinary intensity of color. Mountains, trees, people, and beasts, all are ablaze in glorious hues. Perhaps his numerous brushes with death while in the Vietnamese Resistance elicited Lam's fierce determination to view life as a riot of beauty and sensation.
Phan Cam Thuong: Thuong's work is mystically oriental. Painting with natural mineral pigments and chinese ink, Thuong combines traditional ritual and movement with layers of contemporary reflection. The serene calmness of Thuong's being shines through the expressive beauty of his art.
Phung Pham: A master painter for over 50 years, Pham has developed traditional Vietnamese mediums of lacquer painting and woodblock print in a uniquely contemporary way. Inspired by the minority tribes he lived among during his formative years, Pham emphasizes geometrics of pattern and line to evoke lyrical and stylized visions of Vietnam.
Tran Huu Chat: Beginning as a poster painter, working in charcoal on dried banana leaf, Tran Huu Chat quickly advanced to painting, printing and lithography. In 1956, he studied at the re-opened Hanoi Academy of Fine Art under Hoang Tich Chu and attained fame as an illustrator of children’s books. Following postgraduate studies in China and France, he was sent during the American War to depict the armed struggle; his art has since focused on the ethnic tribes whom he portrays in carved lacquer paintings. Eight of his paintings are in the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum in Hanoi.
Thanh Chuong: Chuong's paintings cry out the colorful melancholy of human existence. In the tradition of Miro and Picasso, figures and shapes are detached and then reassembled in vivid affirmation of the artist's passionate search for meaning.
Trinh Tuan: A master of lacquer painting, Tuan expands upon the traditional tones and themes of classical lacquer art to include contemporary materials. Shimmering shades and hues dissolve and recompose into human figures, invoking the power and universality of emotions.
Vu Duc Toan: Toan beguiles us with bright colors and simple folk motifs. His simplicity of style represents a conscious move away from sophistication and towards Naive Art.
Pedro Hernandez Torres: Torres paints the idyllic countryside of his homeland. In the spirit of Magritte and Delvaux, the village and nature - rivers, trees, sky and clouds - are imbued with mystical illumination. His approach, both hyper-realistic and lyrical, captures the mysterious moment between day and night as a frame for the romanticism of the countryside.
Vu Duc Trung: Trung's lacquer paintings are imbued with the poetry of the Impressionists. The subtlety and delicate shadings of his palette are enhanced by his studies with Trinh Tuan in Hanoi and in the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Vu Dinh Tuan: Tuan transforms traditional icons and media into contemporary language. Images of women playing musical instruments metamorphose into vivid birds and flowers. Village woodblock prints are transmuted into modern printmaking techniques, referencing Matisse in palette and perspective.
Vu Hong Ngoc: Following many years of painting with oils on canvas, Ngoc now expresses herself via the medium of gouache on paper. Her latest works, Seasons of Bamboo, portray human experience and nature in term of space, time, and change.
Vuong Le My Hoc: Working in mixed media (watercolor, gouache, ink and silver lacquer powder) on handmade paper, Vuong Le My Hoc portrays social patterns. Fish and dragonflies flow together in schools of harmony. Her paintings are delicate and vivid depictions of harmony in nature.
Vu Thu Hien: Hien paints magical mysteries using watercolor on traditional Vietnamese handmade paper. Ethnic figures both fairytale and real, shimmering and equivocal, combine with tropical foliage and exotic interiors to weave timeless melodies in celebration of nature's patterns and human passions, intertwined.
