When I look at Ha Hung’s paintings, it seemed I can see, feel and discover what painting really is. To me, his paintings are expressions of a spiritual adventure, craft and calmness, just like when you are lying in the garden looking at the sunlight through the trees. His most recent paintings are indeed painted outdoor.
Painter Ha Hung was born in Long An in 1970. He graduated from the HCMC Fine Arts University in 2001. For many years he was experimenting with different techniques and mediums. Now, he concentrates on oil painting. He also took part in many group exhibitions, bienniales in the country.
They are essential definitions of what painting can and should be. Hung can make an artistically challenging scene out of everything, just like the old masters: a painting with all its complicated elements and levels. It may seem to an untrained eye that some of his paintings are very skilfully analyzed photographs of nature by memory, but they are also pure artistic solutions brought to the abstract. “Nature is my model, he explains. She is lying her beauty in front of me and I want to give her justice the best I can. I am like the interpreter of her silent beauty. So I simplify, magnify the movement and colors, trying to keep only its essence”. Hung explores the colour, light, space, composition, local tone, shade and details, in the scenes which bring the joys of painting closer to the observer.
Harsh, but fluid at the same time, this kind of painting brings up emotions and caresses the senses. Hung’s world of gardens, herbs, meadows, flowers, bushes, trees, forest clearings and paths, cherry orchards and shadowy skies or soft light is full of flavours and sounds of nature. His paintings are the simplest and the most universal, as much as the art of landscape painting allows. They are common places where atmosphere, densities and characters are hidden. It illustrates the old saying “in order to live happily, live hidden in nature”.
In his early paintings, Hung was much more tourmented. “The last year in university was really bad, he recalls. The jury did not give me my diploma and I was really upset”. This is when he painted a gloomy cene, representing the twelve members of the jury and its president as monsters having dinner. I asked him if they were eating his flesh and drinking his blood, so to speak. He laughed and replied: “maybe in my subconscious it was how I felt. It takes a lot of courage and a massive dose of passion to become a true professionnal painter. This is the path I chose. I finally got my diploma the next year… just to know now that no diploma will make you an artist, only your heart will”. The cene painting was bought by collector Le Thai Son. Son indeed helped Hung a lot at the beginning: “his painting moves me deeply, Son says. Hung was young and talented and I wanted to do something for him. I don’t do that with every artist I meet. But with Hung, it was special. So I bought him his first paintings and gave him canvasses. Nothing to do with speculation. Only with passion. Anyway, giving him canvasses did not mean that I would obviously buy his painting!” Today, Son still keeps buying Hung’s paintings for his private collection and gallery located on 92/30 Pham Ngoc Thach, district 3 (Ho Chi Minh City).
Hung also believes that all exaggerations in art is a kind of weakness. In that sense, he finds a limit in creation, an ideal spiritual remoteness in painting, which is in accordance with the closeness with the nature. “I just want to give back what I receive from nature. Nothing more. There is no need for make-up so to speak”, Hung says. As well as chamber music or poetry, these paintings awake in me the personal and the deepest: memories, dreams, joys, and sadness. Can we ask for more from art? With Hung’s works, I can feel the truth of art – celebration and peace of mind, quietness and abstraction.
