Nguyen Dieu Thuy

Oil on Canvas

Nguyen Dieu Thuy , one of Vietnam's leading contemporary artists, paints striking images using almost a monochromatic palette with her signature background in white. Her potrayal of women combines both the modern and the traditional - the Ao dai costume epitomises the grace and poise of the Vietnamese aesthetic and yet the sharp angles and lines convey the pace and modernity of the West.

Nguyen Dieu Thuy was born in Ho Chi Minh City in 1962. After graduating from the Conservatoire de Musique in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988, she worked as a teacher and a violinist in the Conservatoire's Symphony Orchestra before embarking on a career as a professional artist in 1991. Her work has since been exhibited in Asia, Europe and North America.

Her oeuvres encompass three distinct subject matters: semi-abstract compositions of symmetrically arranged rice bowls and chopsticks, women dressed in traditional white ao dai, and waterside scenes of fishermen or people working in the rice fields which capture the atmosphere of the artist's native environment in southern Vietnam.