Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, Singapore

*Please note that this lot is located in Singapore. Buyer is responsible to arrange shipping from present location of lot to buyer's desired destination. To enquire shipping quote, please contact singapore@bonhams.com.


I paint with industry and cleverness as a mason's laborer but also with the pleasure and indulgence of a little boy who dips his hands into the sand on the beach to build his own palace. I, too, have an extreme deep longing for dipping my hands in the material I use to paint: trowel and brush are not enough for me

— Nguyen Trung

After graduating from the Gia Dinh National College of Fine Arts in 1962, Nguyen Trung specialised in oil painting and developed a stylistic identity between tradition and modernity. As a young man, he was one of the founding members of the Vietnamese Young Artists Association established in 1966 and disbanded in 1975. Trung's painting style has alternated between abstraction and figuration, each evolving and serving as a polar driving force to the other. His work is marked by an expressionist, symbolist, and allegorical character. Today, he is one of the most prominent and celebrated living Vietnamese artists still working from his studio in Ho Chi Minh City. He had a solo exhibition at Insight, Art Basel Hong Kong in 2014, and his works are exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, including in 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.

Lady with Lotus and Fish was painted in 2007. The subject, a beautiful young woman, appears before us against a background of glowing estival colours—warm orange, yellow, and green. She wears a halo-like headdress that frames her perfect oval face and serene expression and a pale yellow ao dai that sways in the wind revealing the pure white garment beneath. The subject with her long slender limbs and torso, as well as the dark outline of the figure are reminiscent of Modigliani's work, while the background is painted more freely to abstraction. The artist integrates the colours through form with painterly strokes used to highlight the transition of the pigments. 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, Trung has stayed true to his artistic vision, his work testament to his recognition as one of the major artists of his era.