Nguyen Dam Thuy

Across more than three decades of practice, Nguyen Dam Thuy has shaped a deeply personal visual language around nature, memory and the inner lives of women. Her paintings consider freedom not as escape, but as the courage to preserve imagination within the responsibilities of everyday life.

For Nguyen Dam Thuy, painting has always been closely connected to dreaming. Not the fleeting dreams that disappear upon waking, but the persistent inner visions that accompany a person through family life, social expectations and the gradual passing of time. Across oil, acrylic, watercolour and lacquer, the Vietnamese artist has returned to nature, womanhood and spiritual reflection as ways of understanding what it means to remain emotionally alive.

Born in 1967, Thuy graduated from Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 1993. She is a member of both the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Association and the Vietnam Fine Arts Association. Her practice has developed over more than three decades, with works entering private collections across Vietnam, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, China and South Korea.

Her early solo exhibitions already revealed an interest in journeys of memory and self-discovery. Wandering was presented at the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Association in 1995, followed by Remember at Green Space Contemporary Art Center in 1998 and Tranquil Realm at Lotus Gallery in 2005. In 2016, her fourth solo exhibition, My Dream, brought together 69 paintings at the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition explored the landscapes of Vietnam, childhood memories, environmental fragility and the quiet strength of Vietnamese women.

Nature in Thuy’s work is rarely a passive backdrop. Rivers, forests, mountains and open skies carry emotional and spiritual weight. Her paintings have considered the beauty of the Vietnamese landscape alongside the damage caused by human carelessness, turning colour and movement into an appeal for greater tenderness towards the natural world. This concern shaped her project Journey to Protect Natural Heritages, supported by UNESCO from 2016 to 2021.

Yet her recent lacquer painting Dream of Freedom brings this wider search inward. Created in 2024, the monumental work depicts horses racing across a luminous expanse. For Thuy, they represent an untamed part of the self, one that continues to imagine open horizons even while living within obligation. The image emerged from her experience as an artist, wife and mother of four, roles defined by devotion but never separated from the need to create.

The work does not frame freedom as abandonment. Instead, it asks whether love, responsibility and personal desire might exist without diminishing one another. Its galloping horses embody movement, yet the painting’s emotional centre lies in stillness: the private space in which a woman listens to her own voice and refuses to let it disappear.

This balance between personal experience and collective memory has remained central to Thuy’s practice. Her exhibitions have extended from Vietnam to Germany, Thailand, China and South Korea. In 2026, she participated in Encounter, a Vietnam–France presentation at the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts, and Art Dialogue, an Indonesia–Vietnam exhibition at Lotus Van Art Hub. There, her lacquer works contributed to a broader conversation around Vietnamese history, cultural memory and ecological change.

Nguyen Dam Thuy’s art is ultimately sustained by a belief in the transformative power of imagination. Her paintings do not deny the weight of life. They make room within it, allowing the soul to breathe, move and continue dreaming.