Nguyễn Thúy Hằng was born in Saigon and graduated from University of Fine Arts - Saigon. She is one of the few outstanding artists from the post-war generation, both in literature and visual arts of Vietnam. Her first trilogy, Current Times, Good Sensations, and Reasonable Insanity, written during a two-year adventure in the USA, was published by Knowledge Publisher and Young Publisher, Hanoi, 2006, and became a phenomenon in the country.
She hones her skills as an ambidextrous player in both literature and visual arts, balancing herself on the tightrope as she gives her whole heart and mind to either form of expression. Her paintings and sculptures exalt sentiments already imbued in her writing, and her short stories generate imaginative spaces where her visual arts can take on more cryptic and phantasmagorical shapes through text. In her stories, Nguyễn Thúy Hằng deconstructs the mental psyche of different groups of people in society, employing a hermeneutic approach as she teases out behavioural nuances and breathes them into a novel structure tinted with fantasy and hysteria - a world where all our deeply-held secrets and inner turmoil surface and demand us to face them.
Her works have been exhibited and collected widely. Some of selected exhibitions: solo 'Histoire d’un voyage: sand in my ears, adrift of the world’', The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Saigon, Vietnam, 2017; group exhibition ‘On the stream’, The Third Kunming Art Biennale, Kunming Fine Arts Art Museum, China, 2016; group exhibition ‘SHE’, Sweet Art-Ugly Duck Gallery, London, United Kingdom, 2016; solo exhibition ‘The Warriors ’, CDEF Funds and Post Vidai Collection, Saigon Domaine, Saigon, Vietnam, 2015…
Her literary publications also appear in the Singapore Art Book Fair, prestigious literary journal Kill Your Darlings (Australia), diaCRITIC (USA), Vagabond Press (Australia) and are in the collection of the Hongkong Library Museum-Taiwun Contemporary Art Museum. She holds many exhibitions and art talks in the US, UK, China, India and Sweden as well. Her artworks had been collected by private collectors in and outside of the country.
- Duong M. Hung