Nguyen Quang Minh (Vietnam)

“I love Vietnamese folklore. I’ve grown up with it. Folklore permeates the popular prints created in my mother’s home place, the famous Dong Ho village. It is in the lullabies by which my mother soothed me into sleep.”

Nguyen Quang Minh was born in 1970 into a family of factory workers who had no connection to the arts. The subject matter of most of his paintings is rural life, expressed through a muted colour palate and a delicate combination of hues to create bucolic scenes that are sparse and lyrical and imbued with a serene innocence. Quang Minh employs simplified images of buffaloes, dragon flies and graceful Vietnamese “everywoman” figures which are drawn from Vietnamese cultural archetypes.

His subject matter and style combine seamlessly to form a metaphor for his world view: “I am striving to get to the spiritual essence of things -- something beyond the visible which keeps escaping me. I try to say as much as I can with as little as possible.”

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