Artist's Statement
Identity politics are at the heart of my work. As a gay
Vietnamese-American male, my paintings explore the many
dualities that I inhabit—East vs. West, tradition vs.
modernity, faith vs. reality, national vs. individual
identity—and how they can lead to a sense of displacement.
My work attempts to document the transmutable and subjective
nature of our identities. With the Refugee Series, I
subverted documentary language by cutting and pasting
different realities to form a convincing, personal one. Time
and space are ambiguous. Consequently, the figure is caught
in an eternal limbo where one searches for, and creates a
sense of self. With the Boat People Series, I attempt show
how our identity can become linked to a larger event that
may override our individual personality. This event can
cause whatever specificity we have to blend and blur, until
we are but ghosts of ourselves. After visiting Vietnam for
the first time, I realized that there had been a
long-standing tradition of working in black and white.
Inspired by this, I have begun making very large
faux-ancestral drawings using the Vietnamese method, ve voi
bot ve sot. In Transients, I am not trying to capture the
person—in sharp focus with high attention to detail--but
rather I am interested how memory may alter an identity.
Bio
Thuan Vu was born in Saigon,
Vietnam and settled with his family in New Orleans, LA. He
received his undergraduate degree from Centre College and
his M.F.A. from Louisiana State University. The recipient of
numerous awards and grants, Thuan exhibits and lectures
nationally. His paintings examine constructions of identity
and has taken him to Vietnam and to France to study
Vietnamese communities world-wide. Thuan’s work has been
reviewed and featured in many publications including The New
York Times, The New Haven Register, The New Delta Review,
and The Connecticut Review. He currently lives in New Haven,
CT where he is an Associate Professor of Art at Southern
Connecticut State University.
Web Site:
www.thuanvu.com
