Featured Artists
Interested to learn more about the talent behind each piece you see? Scroll below to quench your curiosity.
Le Pho (Vietnam b. 1907)
Le Pho is known as one of the original masters of modern Vietnamese artwork. From 1925 until 1930, Le Pho studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Hanoi. At this point, he earned a scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under the instruction of Victor Tardieu, a friend and companion of Henri Matisse. Upon returning to Vietnam he taught at the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de l'Indochine in Hanoi.
Kim Dong-Yoo (b. 1965)
Kim Dong Yoo is possessed by a fastidious artistic interest in the image within image, evidenced in the painstaking process of hand-painting the miniature grid portraits making up the whole image. His paintings defy the urge to visually apprehend everything at once. Instead, each composition is composed of elemental pixelated grid images, each of which is a microcosm existing in its own right yet interacting with the overall impression conjured up by the organic conglomeration of each unit.
Referencing the mass-production & propagation of images pioneered by Pop Art notables like Andy Warhol, Kim Dong Yoo's works, however, turn in new direction; by hand-painting every tiny portrait without the aid of stencils, stamps or computers, and repeating such laborious process on end for months, Kim Dong Yoo subverts & challenges the idea of the reproducibility of the "icon" by appropriating image for intricate, one-of a-kind compositions, a revolutionary novelty that has garnered him a great deal of reputation.
Nguyen Manh Hung (b. 2000)
Nguyen Manh Hung is a Vietnamese multidisciplinary artist, who makes art that reflects the comical situations arising from the rapid yet piecemeal processes of domestic urbanization and modernization.
Nguyen Manh Hung's artworks present immersive environments with droll juxtapositions that cleverly allude to national and cultural realities in Vietnam, as well as personal and contemporary life experiences, focusing on the visual relationships of disjointed elements and unusual scales. Hung reflects on the idea of community, the conflicts that exist within and without constructed societies, and the complexities of civic development and individual responsibility. Depicting military airplane laden down with oversize grocery items, or else soaring across the sky with bushels from the rice harvest, Hung's surreal scenes humorously morph a symbol of destruction with conduits of hope, benevolence and joy.
Rudi Mantofani (b. 1973)
Rudi Mantofani is a sculptor and painter whose work takes ordinary objects and landscapes and transforms them into strange or absurd ‘visual parables’. With a meticulous technique and a high level of finish, Mantofani’s works are associative and thought-provoking meditations on human experience and behaviour. The ordering of disparate forms within his work introduces seemingly unimportant objects and vistas as significant. His landscape paintings depict imagery removed from reality – duplications and mutations. Such visual dialogues originate from his personal observations of the world ‚made up of things‘. Transcending ubiquitous traditional approaches to landscape painting, Mantofani hopes to transform and investigate the activity of seeing.
Cécile Plaisance (b. 1968)
Cécile Plaisance uses universal emblems such as Barbie, cinema icons or podiums. Behind the symbols, there is the power of appearance, the personal requirement, the communicated dream, the factory of the world. The artist admires women as much as she loves men. His work is not a fight, nor a war of the sexes. It’s an ode to femininity. To love. It is an expression of the need to find male-female balances.
Walasse Ting (b. 1929)
Walasse Ting (1929-2010) was born in Wuxi, China and brought up in Shanghai. At the age of 23, he moved to France and became acquainted with the artists of the anti-formalism movement COBRA. Strongly influenced by Matisse and other masters, his early works were mainly plain black abstract embedded with flying emotions and Asian spiritual connotation. Inspired by Western contemporary art, while exploring the fusion of Chinese and Western aesthetics, Ting began to develop figurative drawings with liberating style. He was famous for his unique blending of vivid colours on rice paper. With expressive dripping strokes and bright fluorescent colours, nude women, flowers, parrots, horses and fish are energetic, sensational and dreamy in Ting’s paintings.
Ronald Venture (b. 1973)
Born in 1973 in Manila, the Philippines, where he continues to live and work, Ronald Ventura ranks as one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation in Southeast Asia. With works selling for over $1 million USD at the esteemed Sotheby’s Auction House.
Ventura’s paintings and sculptures are now among the most recognizable images of contemporary art in Southeast Asia with their unique combinations of figurative motifs. His work features a complex layering of images and styles, ranging from hyperrealism to cartoons and graffiti.
