Nguyen Trung

(b. 1940)

Lotus Flower

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, Thailand (acquired directly from the artist)

阮忠
蓮花
二〇〇七年作

簽名：ng.Trung 007
油彩畫布

來源
泰國私人收藏

Eighty-one years old and still working from his studio in Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen Trung is today celebrated as a living national treasure. As a young man, he was one of the founding members of the Vietnamese Young Artists Association, established in 1966 and disbanded in 1975. After graduating from the Gia Dinh National School of Fine Arts in 1962, he specialised in oil painting and developed a stylistic identity that balanced tradition and modernity. His artistic journey led him to explore abstraction and figuration, with each technique expanding his proficiency in the other. His work is marked by an expressionist, symbolist, and allegorical character.

As one of Vietnam's most prominent artists, Nguyen Trung was the subject of a solo exhibition in 2014 at Insights, Art Basel Hong Kong. His works are exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, including the Vietnamese National Fine Arts Museum in Hanoi, the Ho Chi Minh Fine Art Museum, the Singapore Art Museum, the Archivio Biblioteca Museo Civico in Italy, and the collection of the United Overseas Bank, Singapore.

In Lotus Flower, we can observe the beauty of Nguyen Trung's figurative paintings for which he is well known and admired. The portrait shows a young Vietnamese lady in profile and she is dressed in an ornate golden blouse with her hair veiled under a translucent scarf. She holds up both hands in front of her, offering up a single lotus bud, a symbol of both purity and enlightenment. The painting invokes a sense of beauty and serenity. The pink and green colours of the lotus bud are echoed in the rosy cheeks, green eyeshadow and jade earrings of the young lady, harmonising the composition through this allegorical use of colour.

Nguyen Trung painted both innocence and sensuality—the woman's character radiates a sense of purity and strength, a timeless allegory of the idealised feminine. Weathering fads and political storms, he has stayed true to his artistic vision, his work testament to his status as one of the most significant artists of his era.