ARTIST
HUYNH PHUONG DONG
Visions of War and Peace

Huynh Phuong Dong is considered one of Vietnam's National Living Treasures. He has received numerous awards from the Vietnamese government as well as the Ho Chi Minh City government. He is on the board of directors at the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Association and teaches at the School of Architecture in Ho Chi Minh City. He lives with his wife of over fifty years at number 21 Dong Dat Street where his home has become a living museum. Every square inch of wall space is adorned with hundreds of Dong's drawings and paintings. In addition, the floor is piled with frames and cabinets containing thousands of additional masterpieces chronicling his long and rich life.

He was born in 1925 in Soc Trang Province. In 1940, he was the only one from his province to be admitted to the prestigious Gia Dinh Fine Arts School where he studied until graduating in 1945. He joined the resistance against the French immediately upon graduation and served the next nine years in "Uncle Ho's Army" mostly in the Sac forest where he also made thousands of sketches and paintings and became well known as a war painter. When the French were defeated in 1954, Dong moved to the north where he attended the Hanoi Fine Arts College majoring in sculpture. He graduated in 1963 and immediately returned to South Vietnam and joined "Uncle Ho's Army" again only this time to fight against the Americans for the next twelve years.

At the end of the American War in 1975, Dong returned home and immediately began recording the past thirty years of his life in a series of drawings and paintings. In addition to the French and American Wars, his subjects include many portraits and scenes from the traditional country life in Vietnam. His works represent far more than his war experience and many of his paintings and drawings show his love for traditional Vietnamese life in the countryside and of course his wonderful portraits. He works in pencil, pastel, oil, acrylic and more traditionally in silk and lacquer.

Today you can find Dong's artwork in nearly every major collection in Vietnam. He has exhibited widely in Vietnam as well as many countries overseas. He still paints every day and loves making portraits of nearly everyone he meets. He is happiest when he has a pencil or paint brush in his hand and is drawing.

The Vietnamese government has published several small booklets and loose packages of his work but has yet to produce a quality book of his artwork. The time is long overdue to produce a quality book of Dong's important work about the Vietnamese culture and the wars which he has so intimately and knowingly captured on paper and canvas. From his carefully and lovingly drawn portraits of Vietnamese and American POWs, battle scenes, many painted during or immediately following the battle, to his complex paintings of a rural market or Vietnam's minority people, Dong's artwork gives us the unique perspective of a man of great passion and talent. This work must be preserved and presented for future generations.