Nguyễn Quốc Dũng Vietnamese, b. 1983

Nguyễn Quốc Dũng (b.1983) graduated from the oil painting department of the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 2014. Dung’s artworks capture moments in time, offering a glimpse into everyday life and depicting empathetic yet straightforward portraits of immigrants, transgender people, and marginalized groups often ignored or excluded from society. Dung’s unconventional depictions of characters go beyond the idealized beauty standards, portraying their slice of life reality.

Working on the basis of revealing the hidden lives of both immigrant workers or transgender people, his creative practice hijacks boundaries to reveal the human-to-human realities which unfold within shared spaces. Through his practice, Dũng provides windows into the most personal and human moments of their private lives, which was partly observed from his own ethnographic investigation within rental rooms. This also allows him to play with the polarity of perception within the urban landscape; from navigating the city’s ebbs and flows unseen, to the erosion of personal privacy.