DINH THI THAM POONG
b. 1970Dinh Thi Tham Poong’s work is whimsical and sincere. Her work is steeped in a feeling of genuine wonder. Wonder at how one survives in harsh conditions, wonder at the love that surrounds us all, wonder when experiencing the deepest silence. As Poong says, “To my mind everything has two distinct halves. A fish, for example, is half animal, half vegetal. The same is true with humans. Everything contains, holds each other, is intertwined with each other.” It is this idea of the two-fold nature of life and its simultaneous interconnectedness which plays itself out in Poong’s work. Poong combines images from her own Muong heritage with a surrealist visual landscape imbuing her works –both formally and emotionally – with a quality which can be described as utterly unique and completely global. Pure flights of the imagination fuse with concrete details from daily life creating images that work and play in the ethereal landscape of the mind.
Typically, her works reflect a structured convergence of her life in nature with her city life. Utilizing pattern upon pattern in a flat palette of color on traditional Do paper, the artist creates a world at once introspective and surrealistic. Depictions of ethnic minorities juxtaposed with flat decorative pattern are flights of imagination fused with normal daily life.
In 2007 Tham Poong’s works were shown in the traveling exhibition “Changing Identity: Recent works by women artists from Vietnam”, which opened at the Kennesaw State University Art Galleries, Kennesaw, Georgia and traveled to several museums in the United States; Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art, Dallas, Texas, Stedman Art Gallery, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City 2008, Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota 2009.
Dinh Thi Tham Poong has exhibited widely internationally and her works are in the permanent collections of the Singapore Art Museum, Fukuoka Asean Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan, the Rupertinum Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, the MacLean Collection Mundelein, Illinois, USA, the New York Historical Society NYC, and the Post Vidai Collection, Vietnam/Switzerland among others.
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