Paintings sent to the windy sky

The paintings in the exhibition were made from 2019 - 2024, more than half of which were painted by Phuong in 2024. The materials range from pencil, pigment, silk, oil paint, lacquer, most of which are oil paintings - Phuong's major. If Phuong's pencil and pigment paintings use dark, similar colors, Phuong's oil paintings use many bright, contrasting colors. Emotions are like a gradually expanding sphere, from vague, quiet to fierce, explosive. The artist changes from a calm observing object to a subject immersed in sadness with a passionate desire to send it away.

It is not by chance that Phuong named her exhibition “Sad Sky, High Wind”. Sadness followed her after her family moved, separated from her relatives, and received malicious comments from her childhood classmates. Phuong loves drawing, but her first choice of major was law. She graduated and worked in law before entering the University of Fine Arts. The journey Phuong has gone through is very much like an adventure, with changes that are almost unforeseen.

Like the way Phuong starts to draw a picture, Phuong does not sketch carefully, her feelings and thoughts while drawing will lead her. Where to turn, which way to go, which way to try... drawing is also "exploring" that picture. Phuong is both an explorer and a creator of a scene to explore. The final revelation, where Phuong arrives, can be the body of a dead bird on the beach with its feathers still intact, the remaining bones, or sometimes a forest, a shallow land, a flooded bank, a construction site, a deserted city... - a place that is both very lonely and hopeful, both passionate and eager to leave.

The viewer asks, is this loneliness worth it? Surely the artist did not intend to instill loneliness in anyone who stood before the painting or looked at it. Loneliness is also not a metaphor for anything grand or majestic. But if, gathering those lonely veins, the flow of truth appears.

The artist draws bones because he is afraid of bones, draws dreams because he has been frightened in his dreams, draws birds because his beloved bird flew away from home and never returned... The fears and losses a person endures, even though they are private, why can't they be turned into paintings to talk about something valuable? The confrontation, the dissection, the chaining of emotions, moods, thoughts - why distract from concentration?

People talk about purity, just like the requirement that pure painting must maintain a distinct visual language quality that is completely different from the characteristics of theater and literature - causing direct, selective emotions, not interpreting, telling, or being long-winded - with sparkling eyes as if carrying a responsibility and mission. But is such a requirement for an artist who has just started his painting career too strict, and too much expectation?

Expectations and burdens, if held for too long, can dull one’s emotions, leading to fear, uncertainty, and hesitation, making one not dare to start doing anything. Thinking takes a long time, drawing takes a long time, but if one does not start drawing, the painting will “never be finished”. Thus, the gap between the desire to create and the actual painting will become increasingly difficult to narrow.

Although the vision of a solo exhibition may be different, Phuong's boldness in this first exhibition is a good experience for any artist when stepping into the path of professional painting. Each of Phuong's interpretations along with the exhibited paintings, whether shallow or deep, may not be really necessary in the eyes of some colleagues, but for Phuong, painting is for fun and words are also a visual language.

While others have the story of “crying because of drawing”, Phuong only “draws because of crying”. But thanks to studying law, Phuong also has a strong enough mind to maintain the discipline that her friends studying fine arts often lack. She is able to endure even things she does not like. Drawing is fun, but artists do not always like to draw. Especially many paintings are bad, they have to be “thrown away”. Phuong said that she still draws, “biting her teeth to draw, even though she is tired, she still tries”, and also “went through many paths” to be able to feel it deeply.

Among those many paths, perhaps the most valuable one was the one that led Phuong to connect with what he thought was lost and broken, with someone, with something. Art can bridge separation, distance, and sadness; painting can bring sadness to the windy sky, enough to make one, even if one does not deeply sympathize with someone else's great sadness, still see "sadness is very beautiful".

That beauty is like the birds flying, flying above the treetops, where "Every trembling leaf is made of tears" as Phuong once wrote.