The exhibition "Dat Me" will display more than 30 oil paintings, painted by artist Nguyen Nhu Duc during his 11 years of living and working in Hoi An. The works pursue the "super-realistic" school, where the human body and natural elements are realistically recreated but bring unreasonable arrangements to express the artist's dream.
In this exhibition, Nguyen Nhu Duc opens a journey to discover the legend of "Mother Land" - the concept of dominating the spiritual life of Vietnamese people through oil paint and surreal paint.
"Mother Land" creates a feeling of a vast garden, where women, from the past and future, the worlds here and there of Germany meet. That is where nature blends with the human body. The models in the artist's paintings are the mother, the wife, the daughters. The paintings are dense with details and meticulous in technique, taking many months and years to complete. They are painted in large pieces, difficult to collect with the priority of telling the dreams of "Mother's Land".
Even in surreal space, I still believe that anyone will find an emotional intersection in this exhibition. "Mother" is the homeland, the wife, the daughter or even our mother. Everyone has a sacred position in each person, whether abstract or tangible, the artist shared.
Nguyen Nhu Duc was born in 1980, in Hanoi. Like many artists of the same generation, he has experienced many years of painting without being able to "encourage" the creator. Han still held a ring, but he worked enough to make a living, before going abroad to Hoi An, staying there and starting a family.
Nguyen Nhu Duc's dream is not far from the reality of his own life. These are not great metaphors of the universe, but simple dreams of human life. Before becoming an artist, he was a 45-year-old man who had experienced many ups and downs and wandered.
The concept of Mother Land has been discovered many times in Vietnamese painting, because of many genres and styles. But the surrealist school attracted me, because it allowed me to create a boundless universe, containing all the most vague ideas about "Mother Earth", Nguyen Nhu Duc shared.
The exhibition will display 30 works at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum (Hanoi) from July 3-7, 2025 and "Chillala - House of Art" (HCMC) from August 1-10, 2025.
