Artist Thuan Vu

Kintsugi no. 20 (2024), 55″H x 45″W, oil and acrylic on linen.

Kintsugi no. 9 (2023), 30″H x 30″W, oil on linen on board.

Kintsugi in the New World 1 (2024), 36″H x 36″W, oil on canvas.

Transients (Brothers) (2004), 40″H x 26″W, charcoal and pastel on paper.

Transients (Three Sisters) (2010), 30″H x 30″W, oil on canvas.

Artist Thuan Vu.

Thuan Vu says that his work deals with “generational trauma,” and no wonder. Fifty years ago, in April 1975, when Vu was two years old, Saigon fell to the invading North Vietnamese army. Vu’s father was a politician and officer in the South Vietnamese army, so their family, like thousands of other Vietnamese, fled the country on a boat. One of Vu’s brothers, in the army at the time, was captured and spent ten years in a Vietnamese concentration camp.

After living as refugees in Guam and Arkansas, Vu’s family settled in New Orleans and opened a Chinese restaurant, because, he says, Vietnamese food wasn’t yet popular. Early on, Vu rejected a lucrative profession or the priesthood, as his parents would have preferred, and instead showed a predilection
for art. He would sit in the restaurant between shifts and draw. They were relieved when he earned an MFA and secured a professorship at Southern Connecticut State University, a post he’s held for more than twenty-five years.

Vu matches different artistic techniques to the ideas he wants to explore, which has resulted in series of works, each with a distinctive look. His Kintsugi series, for instance, employs precise, graphic, and colorful depictions of flowers to express his interest in kintsugi, the Japanese artform of repairing broken pottery, often with precious metals, that serves as a metaphor for the beauty that can be found in our flaws and scars. For his Transients series, he paid homage to a technique used in Vietnam for duplicating and enlarging family photographs that involves dabbing charcoal powder onto paper with tiny felt-tipped brushes, creating haunting portraits of people isolated and disoriented by their refugee experience. “Coming to the U.S. can be confusing, it can be strenuous, it can be terror-infused,” says Vu, “but it can also be hopeful and beautiful.”

To see more of Thuan Vu’s artwork, visit thuanvu.com.