Category: Artists

Tuan Andrew Nguyen graduated from the Fine Arts program at the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and received his Masters of Fine Arts from The California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He is a co-founder of Sàn Art, an artist-initiated exhibition space and educational program in Sai Gon, Viet Nam. Tuan has shown in numerous film festivals, internationl exhibitions, having works in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, Carre d’Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Soloman R. Guggenheim Museum. Tuan has received several awards in both film and arts, including an Art Matters grant in 2010. His work explores the body as sites and and as moments of resistance in public space and the impact of mass media on these moments of resistance. In his continual attempts at reworking the power dynamics of public space and mass media in general, he founded The Propeller Group in 2006, an art collective who positions themselves between a fake advertising company and archeologists of hidden historical conundrums. Accolades for the collective include the main prize at the 2015 Internationale Kurztfilmtage Wintherthur and a Creative Capital award for their video project Television Commercial for Communism. The collective has been featured in numerous international exhibitions including the The Ungovernables [2012 New Museum Triennial], Made In LA [2012 Los Angeles Biennial], Propsect 3 [New Orleans Triennial 2014], and the Venice Biennale 2015.

Truong Tan was born in 1963 in Hanoi, Vietnam. He graduated from the Fine Art School Hanoi in 1982, and the University of Fine Art Hanoi in 1989. He served as a lecturer at the latter from 1989 to 1997 before becoming a full-time artist. Following the advent of the Doi Moi (renovation) policy in 1986, which liberalized Vietnam’s market policies, there was a resurgent artistic romanticization of Vietnam’s past. Truong, for his part, abandoned the country’s then-current academicism in favor of a practice focused on the complexities of human psychology and social circumstance. Through painting, drawing, performance, installation, sculpture, and ceramics, Truong challenges social convention and investigates themes of identity and freedom of expression. Truong addresses the long-established prejudices that influence Vietnam’s highly traditional society, examining national identity and its intersection with gender stereotypes. Centered on his own identity, the artist’s work explores perceptions of homosexuality in a conservative milieu. Notable group exhibitions include Singapore Biennial (2008); Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial, Japan (2009); Connect: Kunstszene Vietnam, ifa Gallery Berlin (2010) and ifa Gallery Stuttgart (2011); Negotiating Home, History and Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia, 1991–2010, Singapore Art Museum (2011); and 8 Vietnamese Contemporary Artists, Bui Gallery, Hanoi (2012). Truong lives and works in Paris and Hanoi. (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

Dinh Q. Le was born in Ha-Tien and immigrated to the US to escape Khmer Rouge attack in Southern border between Vietnam and Cambodia.  He received his BA in Art Studio at UC Santa Barbara and his MFA in Photography and Related Media at The School of Visual Arts in New York City. In the early 1990s Le has returned to Vietnam and resided in Ho Chi Minh City, where he later co-founded Sàn Art with 3 other established Vietnamese artists. Dinh Q.Le is known for his weaving photographic works and videos that re-imagine different perspectives of the wars in Vietnam and other colonized nations and what is happening now in Vietnamese society. Notable solo exhibitions include ‘Memory for Tomorrow’, Mori Museum, Tokyo, Japan in 2015; ‘Erasure’, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia and ‘Project 93: Dinh Q. Lê’ at MOMA, New York in 2010; ‘A Tapestry of Memories: The Art of Dinh Q. Lê’ at the Bellevue Art Museum, Washington State in 2007 and ‘Destination for the New Millennium, The Art of Dinh Q. Lê’, at the Asia Society, New York in 2005.

Born in 1975 in Montpellier, France, Sandrine Llouquet has lived in Vietnam since 2008. She graduated from École Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherche – Villa Arson in 1999. A dynamic contributor to the development of contemporary art in Vietnam, she was a founding member of Wonderful District, a project that promoted contemporary art through exhibitions, concerts and theatre pieces, as well as a member of Mogas Station, a Vietnam-based artist collective. Llouquet’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California and Tate Modern, London. She has also participated in a number of biennales with Mogas Station such as the Shenzhen Biennale (2007), the Singapore Biennale (2006) and in Migration Addicts – a collateral event of the 52nd Venice Biennale. An ambitious new project was unveiled in KENPOKU Art 2016 in Ibaraki, Japan in September 2016. Sandrine said: “Each of my artworks is a step left behind that shows the building of oneself: wandering, passage from one stage to another, rebellion, escape, rebirth… By pursuing my research on this idea of building oneself – through thinkers including Nietzsche, Freud, Deleuze, or Jung – I naturally came to study the history of alchemy and found deep similarities with my notion of art: a quest for wisdom that goes with material experimentation. Since then, the esoteric/hermetic dimension has kept growing in my practice while I interrogate the ideas of religion and ‘belief’.”

Le Quy Tong was born in Hanoi in 1977 in an artist family. He graduated from Hanoi Fine Art University, currently lives and works in this city. Quy Tong is known for his oil paintings of landscape, figure or scenario with limited colors yet in multiple layers. In the early days, Quy Tong started to paint landmarks of Hanoi such as Long Bien Bridge, Chuong Duong Bridge, Central Post Office… or Vietnam War allegories like military airplanes and tanks. In the last several years, Quy Tong has been working on themes, which are explicitly related to Vietnamese history or implicate struggles, fights, protests, negotiations and escapes for liberation and freedom in separate places, from Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Warsaw to Heiligendamm. The paintings connect incident of one place in a certain period of time to a different time and locale context that ambiguously outline the interrelation of world history and raise the question of human’s perpetual conflicts and revolutions.