Nguyễn Thuý Hằng Vietnamese, b. 1978

Nguyen Thuy Hang (b. 1978), is a visual artist, poet, and writer, graduated from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 2002, and is renowned for her talent in both literature and visual arts. With experiences growing up in post-war Vietnam, as well as training and working in the West and Vietnam, her writings are packed with mystical and chaotic elements, which are also reflected in her paintings and sculptures, evoking a sense of loneliness and isolation within the context of Vietnamese society.

Drawing from her wealth of experiences with seemingly incongruous milieux (educated in the Fine Arts University of the South, lived and practiced for a few years in the USA, then propelled her career forward in the North, before returning to Saigon), Nguyễn Thúy Hằng diverges from the predominant style of socialist realism in Vietnam and tackle hidden taboos in a society still reeling and healing from past wounds. In her stories, Nguyễn Thúy Hằng deconstructs the mental psyche of different groups of people in society, employing a hermeneutic approach as she teases out behavioral nuances and breathes them into a novel structure tinted with fantasy and hysteria - a world where all our deeply-held secrets and inner turmoil surface and demand us to face them. Her stories remind audiences of the need for introspection, to gaze inside and understand society through our inner lens. Perhaps, there, we can learn to accept the world as it is, and meet ourselves in the process.

Her literary publications also appear in presitigous literary journal Kill Your Darlings (Australia), diaCRITIC (USA), Vagabond Press (Australia) and are in the collection of the Hongkong Library Museum-Taiwun Contemporary Art Museum. She holds many exhibitions and art talks in the US, UK, China, India and Sweden as well. Her artworks had been collected by private collectors in and outside of the country.

- Credit: Duong M. Hung