A Moralist 2

Building on the momentum of her 2024 Pretty as a Sheep exhibition organized by Asian Art Bridge at the Palais Royal in Paris, Duong Thuy Duong now turns to watercolor on paper - a medium whose delicacy and unpredictability become central to her new portrait series.

Here, technique becomes the core of the work. Duong pushes watercolor far beyond its conventional lightness, manipulating pigment, water, and paper texture to create a density and emotional weight that feel almost sculptural. The pigments seep into the paper’s fibers, expanding, pooling, and feathering along the grain. Capillary flows, backruns, and soft gradients become expressive tools in their own right, shaping contours that pulse with quiet vitality. In some areas the color saturates to near-opacity; in others it diffuses into translucent veils that reveal the tactile tooth of the paper beneath.

This interaction - water meeting pigment, pigment meeting fiber - forms a living surface. Duong leverages the paper’s absorbency and texture, allowing its roughness or smoothness to dictate the pace of the brush, the bloom of color, and the formation of edges. Her gestures oscillate between deliberate, controlled marks and passages where she relinquishes control entirely, letting the medium create its own organic architectures. Layer upon layer, she builds depth not through thickness, but through the optical vibration of overlapping washes.

The resulting portraits feel less painted than grown - emerging from the paper’s materiality itself. They capture presence not only through image but through texture: the subtle warping of wet paper, the feathered edges of diluted tones, the tension between saturated form and dissolving contour. Vulnerability and serenity arise from these material interactions, revealing an interior landscape shaped as much by water and fiber as by the artist’s hand.