NUONG VAN-DINH TRAN

NUONG VAN-DINH TRAN

Exhibition:

Artist Statement

I’m quite pleased with my everyday activities. I feel free to select subject matter for any kind of my art work. Our living area is so vast and rich that I could find my materials anywhere. My deepest concern, though, is our environment. Far from any kind of restriction, I feel that all of us need to restrict ourselves to save our planet. Don’t waste electricity, energy, recycle utensils, things that you used.

How could you ignore a kind of gradual destruction to your own planet that happens almost everyday? First you witness the disaster of Katrina, then Tsunami, then tornadoes anywhere whether in the plain, the beach, the jungle, or the mountains. Huge floods that destroy habitats, followed by deadly drought that ruin all vegetation. How could you ignore the unusual elevation of our temperatures, the melting of the glaciers happen so fast to be accepted as a natural event; it must be a warning or precursor that something bad will happen to us if we don’t start to do something about it. The worst is our world could disappear from the surface of the Earth.

In my modest way of thinking, each one of us, could save our Earth if we take measures right away to stop these disasters from happening again and again. It’s not too late to do it, but we must do it now.

Based on that simple philosophy, my work is something you can use to add to the security and the lasting, robust state of our planet, something that is positive. I treasure the tranquility, serenity of life, any life. I enjoy everything that exists on Earth, I just leave them alone in the state created by nature and enjoy them.

My work “Early Summer 2007 on Morrison St. NW” shows that we don’t need wealth to be happy. Some existing local landscape with some trees and flowers could become your paradise to admire. My Cat Hippy needs only a tiny place in a shoe to take a good nap. A lost deer in my backyard could romp around and enjoy the place and the food he found as much and as long as he want. They are not disturbed by anything.

Saving your world and make it safe for living is to share everything with other living things. Live a concerned, non-violent but detached life, live and let live. Let others live their own life with no interference.

Biography

Nuong Van-Dinh Tran, a Fine Art artist, was trained as a painter and a printmaker at the Corcoran School of Art, and earned her MFA at the George Washington University.

A native of VietNam, she comes from a culture in which natural elements represent a wide array of deeper cultural motifs and emotions. This exhibition, Nature and Feeling, demonstrates her ongoing attempt to connect these motifs to her adopted country. In her work, traditional Vietnamese elements and significances abound, ranging from the precise placement of a tree branch to the particular hue of a flower. As Nuong’s work shows, the Vietnamese Tinh (feeling) and Canh (landscape) co-exist to comprise a whole element.

In Nuong’s work, common Western subjects — a clapboard house, a picket fence, even the Statue of Liberty — gain greater depth and meaning through their connection to an Eastern visual shorthand. This is particularly true of An Old Oak Tree in Winter, the lead work for this exhibition. In it, Nuong seamlessly blends traditional Vietnamese elements with a common American subject. The painting depicts an oak that grows so close to Nuong’s home that the branches of the tree seem to embrace the house. Like a faithful friend, the old oak tree provides Nuong and her family with refreshing shade in the summer. Its robust branches have grown higher than the roof of the house, making it appear as though the tree is protecting the house and family. In Asian tradition, age confers respectability and dignity; thus the oak tree has, in a sense, earned a place in the home. It is a part of the family.

Nuong Van-Dinh Tran, a Founding Member of the Washington Printmakers Gallery, has her work featured in The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The National Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian Institution, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Library of Congress Fine Prints Collection, the Permanent Collection of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and in many private collections.