Category: Artists

Born in 1987 in Vietnam and moved to Germany at the young age, Sung Tieu is one among young Vietnamese diaspora artists in Europe whose family were experiencing the transition after the fall of Soviet Block and Berlin Wall in the late 1980s. Sung Tieu is known for her playful amalgamation of visual art, fashion, advertisement and film, in which her Vietnamese background and investigation is revealed and socio-politically expanded to broader contexts. Her artworks have been shown widely in England, Germany, Mexico, Wales, Spain and Vietnam. She was featured in Art Basel Statement at Basel in 2017.

Thy Tran (b. in 1988 in Ho Chi Minh City) is a Vietnamese-Australian visual artist currently living and working in Saigon. She graduated in 2012 with a BFA from MADA at Monash University. In 2014, she began working as a freelance photographer, collaborating with several fashion publications in Melbourne. In 2015, she moved to Ho Chi Minh city, where she began to work with other local artists, as well as devote more time to her personal documentary projects.

Tran Minh Duc (b. 1982, Saigon, Vietnam) is drawn to the history of place, how images of the past inspire human action in their appropriated, fragmented and intangible forms such as oral histories, religious calendars, postcards, and found materials/objects. Tran’s work specifically examines the character of urban life in Vietnam, studying the interaction between collective and individual, between ideas of what is local and foreign. His art encompasses performance, photography, collage and installation. Tran was artist-in-resident at Tokyo Wonder Site, Japan (2011) and with Creator Beyond Pressures project, Yangon, Myanmar (2012). He is a recipient of Asian Cultural Council Fellowship 2017, New York City. Tran holds a BA from College of Culture and Arts of Ho Chi Minh City, and currently lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Tran has exhibited widely in Vietnam and internationally.

Vu Dan Tan is one of the most important artists in the contemporary Vietnamese art scene. He was a self-taught artist, born to a playwright in Hanoi in 1946, where he started his career working in the cartoon film studios of Hanoi Television. He worked in this area while travelling in Russia and Cuba, where he subsequently learnt to paint. In 1990, together with his wife Natalia Kraevskaia, Tan founded Salon Natasha, the first private gallery in Hanoi. During the early ‘90s, Salon Natasha was the only independent exhibition space free from governmental control and open to both art professionals and the public. The gallery has played a central role in supporting well-known and emerging artists alike, as well as in introducing art, very often of an experimental and non-commercial nature, to the public. Tan was known for his unique and intriguing artistry of applying recycled and abandoned everyday materials to his works, such as carton boxes or discarded candy packets, which seems to have something in common with child’s play and reflects his innocent and fanciful imagination. Tan’s work varied in scale and medium, from collages of cigarette packets which he cut and painted, to life size temple and boat installations made from appliance boxes. His work has been widely exhibited and collected in countries such as France, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Finland, Japan, USA, Singapore and Vietnam. (Asia Art Archive)