Development, Influence, Artistic Style
Dao Hai Phong is one of Vietnam’s most established contemporary artists. Born in 1965 into an artistic family, with his father, Dao Duc being a well-known artist, Phong started painting from from the age of six. He graduated from Hanoi College of Film and Theatre in 1987 and had a successful career as Chief Designer of the Vietnam Film Studio. He won an award for his outstanding designs at the Vietnam Film Festival. However, Phong’s passion for painting never stopped growing. Today, he still works in the Vietnam Film Studio, but since 1992 he has focused principally on painting.
Phong is famous for his paintings of Hanoi, the surrounding villages, the landscapes, lakes and mountains - the beauty of which has been his endless source of inspiration. His main medium is oil on canvas. Phong describes images of intense light and wide space, villages of bamboo stilted houses, reflected in the surrounding watery landscapes. The abstracted forms are almost Cubic in character, comprised of lurching rhomboids and rectangles to represent pitched roofs and walls, whose age is suggested by rough, jabbing brushstrokes of thick paint. Phong scrapes and piles the paint on the surface of the canvas using a brush and a palette knife to build up an impression of walls and roofs weathered by age.
Phong magnifies form, light and space for dramatic effect. The artist gathers recognizable symbols of national cultural identitiy – bamboo-matted houses and picturesque boats – to evoke a vision of rural life.
Although Phong hardly ever includes people in his work, his paintings are full of life. The warmness of the glowing light coming from a window, or the light from a corner of an old sleepy street. His paintings are based on his memories with the objective of presenting a picture of the Vietnam he loves while preserving the disappearing cultural geography of his childhood.
Phong is Vietnam’s most commercially successful artist. He had several solo and group exhibitions in Vietnam and overseas, such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Japan, UK, Switzerland and the USA. His paintings are enthusiastically sought for and passionately collected by art lovers internationally.
Member of the Vietnam Fine Arts Association
