The Unusual Path of Nguyen Trung Hieu

When Nguyen Trung Hieu's first solo exhibition was presented at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum, many colleagues and art lovers were amazed by the "strange" paintings that blurred binary boundaries.

Painter Nguyen Trung Hieu at his first solo exhibition - Photo: T.DIEU

In fact, Hieu has been quietly drawing for a long time, but before, he "hadn't reached the level where he felt like it, hadn't achieved his vision, so he didn't want to publish it". This exhibition for him is just a break for him to look back on a period of work, a 5-year long thought diary of the artist.

Born into an artistic family with a father who is the famous painter Nguyen Van Chung - former director of the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum, but at the age of 51, Nguyen Trung Hieu just launched his first solo exhibition titled Apparition/Disappearance.

The exhibition space displays nearly 40 works in black and white, painted with synthetic materials selected from many years of research and art practice.

During that long period of time, Nguyen Trung Hieu only pursued one thing he liked: "I always thought about only one thing: space. Humans themselves are a form of space, a physical space mixed with the space of consciousness."

29 years after graduating from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, Nguyen Trung Hieu is an illustrator at a newspaper. He recently appeared in a joint exhibition with Tran Hoang Son (Silhouette exhibition at Art Space).

He immediately made an impression with his strange, surreal paintings that he said were inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Nguyen Trung Hieu pursues a semi-abstract style, with paintings that are rich in emotion but not completely absent but still vaguely visible. He calls it a form of conceptual abstraction, real but not real, appearing and disappearing at the same time to create space. For Trung Hieu, nude painting is just an excuse to express private space.

Tran Nhat Thang - a person who also pursues abstract painting - when viewing Nguyen Trung Hieu's exhibition had to exclaim: "In Hieu's paintings, the boundaries between space and time, reality and abstraction, photography and painting, the secular and spiritual, physical and mental forms, nude and non-nude... are blurred and mixed together. Looking at his paintings, people do not know if the image is escaping from space or if the dust of space is gathering into a shape. It has been a long time since I have seen such a stunning exhibition."

Tran Nhat Thang said Nguyen Trung Hieu is still loyal to easel painting on a 2D painting surface with only two colors, black and white, but creates paintings with magical tones.

Art researcher Vu Huy Thong also praised that nude is an eternal theme of painting, but Nguyen Trung Hieu's way is very different from what people know about nude. In many works, although nude, the space around the subject is the main thing, not the subject.

The tones are almost only black and white, but Nguyen Trung Hieu creates the feeling that the space around the object is moving and twisting thanks to the elaborateness in expressing the very complex strokes in the painting.

BIRD OF PARADISE

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/con-duong-khac-la-cua-nguyen-trung-hieu-20251017093437703.htm