The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Nguyen XuanTiep was born in 1956 and lives in Hanoi, Vietnam. He graduated from the Hanoi Fine Arts College in 1980 and is now working at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. He has little time to devote to painting, yet is among the most productive young painters in Hanoi. Deliberately consigning to oblivion the plastic principles of the European Renais­ sance learned at school, Nguyen XuanTiep, in the vigorous movement for a 'Hanoi school', has turned back to Vietnamese classical norms stored in architectural, sculptural and painting achievements in the Red River delta for one thousand years or so, and tries to bring the spiritual life of the people into his work. From the hard life and changing society he turns his look inward to his grieving and dreamy soul, seeking to attain the inner realities of his own self, his time, his country.The memory's space, taking root in childhood, make him never feel a stranger to a work by Chagall or Matisse. Family, a bird's nest, thevillage gate, a stroll in the open country,amid old towers, a myna, a little dog, the sounds of flute, fantas­ tic pagoda statues and Buddhist pennons ... all these images seem impossible to behold or photograph, yet are alive, ever-present in the memory of everybody in Vietnam. The colours of Nguyen Xuan Tiep's paint­ ings are deep, yet airy; they submerge the counter-objects and dissolve them into a whole, just as a watercourse brims over with every vegetal and animal life in and on it. And at the bottom of it are subconscious emotions, making his painting seem like an act of living rather than the production of an art work. Therefore it invites communi­ cation and intercommunion rather than pre­ senting an achievement. Like all traditional Eastern art works, the paintings of Nguyen Xuan Tiep are, first and foremost, confidences reserved for confidants. Nguyen Quan VIETNAM NGUYEN XUAN TIEP 55 Song of the buffalo boys VI 1992 Oil on canvas 85x120cm Collection: The artist