Artist: NGUYEN THE HUNG

The Hung (a member of Being.Collective) is a young painter based in Ho Chi Minh City who views painting as a fitting medium to convey primordial ideas. He utilizes gouache to document reality and adopts oil as his primary medium to manifest his painterly vision onto canvas. Allowing energy and emotion to take the lead-permitting the artwork to organically form itself through spontaneous movement-is the core process through which his paintings are born. The Hung does not consider a painting to be a passive illustration; rather, each artwork is an independent entity. Once it leaves the easel, it embarks on a liberated life and a distinct destiny of its own, initiating its own dialogue with the viewer entirely free from the artist's intervention.

THE CREATIVE TRAJECTORY
Over the past two years, The Hung's creative trajectory has been a continuous sequence of self-interrogation regarding the intertwined relationship between the individual and society, shifting back and forth between the interior world and the surrounding life. It is a parallel dialogue between the isolation of thought-the convoluted self-questioning of a young individual within the four walls of the studio-and a quiet observation of people in the world outside, where everyone must don social masks and carry their own complex destiny.
When confronting the vast expanses of nature in Ly Son or Phu Yen, he records his surroundings with purely instinctive emotion, revealing the raw beauty of the earth and sky while discovering a resonant bond between humanity and the natural world. For him, painting remains the ultimate vehicle to articulate both the intricate complexities of existence and the immediate beauty of nature.

TECHNIQUE AND VISUAL LANGUAGE
For The Hung, the practice of oil painting centers on channeling his personal energy through the brush or palette knife. Through the physical act of "painting," he welcomes the material fortuities, irregularities, bleeding edges, and unpredictable textures as an essential, inevitable part of the artwork.
The Hung intentionally superimposes deep, heavy layers of color over lighter fields. Rather than smoothing the surface, this layering deliberately exposes the prominent traces of the brush, creating dense, chromatic gradations that pulse with the shifting rhythm of each brushstroke and hue. By fluidly varying the scale, broken strokes, or raw textures of the brush and palette knife, he imparts a distinct character to every color field. Consequently, each spatial zone within the canvas speaks its own material language, orchestrating a composition balanced between warm and cool, density and void, vibrant and muted tones-thereby heightening the vitality of the layout through rhythm and space.