Description:

Mai Duy Minh
Vietnamese, (b.1976)
Spirit Bags, 2001
oil on canvas
signed and dated lower right.

Mai Duy Minh (born in 1976) had two solo exhibitions in Hanoi and the second one, Dust of Life, organized by the Goethe Institute, was said remarkable in his art life. In that exhibition, Mr Xavier Augustin, the director of the Institute, said: "Does not follow contemporary art alternatives, Mai Duy Minh is the unique which is worthily notable in the younger generation of artists in Hanoi." Continuing the style of harmonizing the realistic and surrealistic school in the last solo exhibition, Mai Duy Minh introduces the biggest painting in his art life.
Despite these cataclysmic scenes, Minh is cheerful and outgoing. He can be intense but laughs easily, especially at himself. Born in Haiphong in 1976 as a child Minh drew obsessively although his parents did not have the means to send him to art classes. At home while his parents worked, he drew with chalk on every blank space he could find around the house, sometimes using, as he does today, an entire wall.
"When I was a kid, every autumn moon festival, I made fish lanterns for the kids in my neighbourhood," he says. "It would make me happy to see them all laughing, excited, playing with my creations."
With no art background and no connection to the art community, his several attempts to get into Hanoi University of Fine Arts, like many other exceptional contemporary Vietnamese artists, ended in failure.
"I persevered because I needed to learn the rules in order to break them," he said. He eventually got in and graduated in 1999 and now paints full time.
Although he now lives and works in a studio near Tay Ho (West Lake) district of Ha Noi, he paints almost exclusively about Haiphong and his old neighbourhood, whether it's catastrophic or a domestic scene.
In Cyclo Family using dark thick colours, the artist captures the moment at the end of the day when the father, a cyclo driver, hands the money he has earned to the mother, baby on her hip, in a squalid neighborhood. This is what hard work can do to ordinary lives, killing hope, smothering dreams of beauty and joy.
One of his most arresting paintings is of Uncle Trung, who is a retired soldier, now a water carrier in a Haiphong market. Uncle Trung, whom Minh considers his moral mentor, gazes from the painting, shoulders stooped from a life of back breaking labour, an incongruous flowered wreath on his head, his hand reaching out either to offer or ask for help. It is evocative of pre-Raphaelite style with rich detail, intense colors, and complex composition reminiscent of Italian and Flemish art.
Minh portrays details from every day life, infusing the ordinary with surreal light. He paints broken pots, pans, kettles, furniture but bathed in an incandescence that emits an aura of almost sacred stillness.
Although an artist whose vision extends into inner and outer space, Minh has never been on an airplane or left Vietnam. Yet his imagination has soared beyond the limitation of borders. Leaving home he said is like getting lost, letting his imagination wander. He has not travelled much but remembers in detail everywhere he has been and everything he has seen.
Mai Duy Minh's art captures the duality of light in darkness, life in death, meaning in the meaningless. The paintings freeze scenes in life expressing the intensity of his feelings behind the cool distance of still life. Minh is the kind of artist whom Buddhist culture regards as not having paid his debt in a previous life and reincarnated to repay it with the art he's currently creating.

    Dimensions:
  • 46 3/4"H x 57 1/2"W(stretcher), 55 1/2"H x 67"W(frame)
  • Artist Name:
  • Mai Duy Minh
  • Medium:
  • oil on canvas

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May 17, 2025 11:00 AM EDT
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