Hope – Full

Hope – Full is the continuation of a series of paintings first exhibited by Pham Huy Thong – under the title Hope – at Craig Thomas Gallery in 2015. Born in 1981 and graduated from the Hanoi Industrial Fine Arts University in 2004, Thong is one of Vietnam’s most articulate and talented young artists. The Hope and Hope-Full series are the latest in an impressive number of strong collections of works from an artist still yet to reach forty years old.

Thong’s involvement with the artistic realization of the two iterations of the Hope series began in March 2014, and had its origin in an encounter with an elderly farmer in his home village that left a strong mental mark on him. It was the starting point for Thong’s preoccupation with this subject. Despite a life filled with hard labor and deprivation in the village which had largely been abandoned by the younger generations, this farmer was full of confidence and humorous optimism for the future. This surprising perspective allowed Thong to realize how deep and fundamentally rooted the quality of hope is in Vietnamese society.

Thong’s paintings always need more than a cursory look to decode their various levels of meaning as he continously takes a critical eye to his surroundings and expresses his artistic interpretations in subtle ways. To interpret people’s emotional worlds between the uncertain future and the hope that rises in their hearts, Thong uses clouds as a symbol of dark and bright thoughts which link real world forms with abstract, spiritual realities. Humans are the focus of his paintings and hard work is often a necessity for them to live. This motif tempts the attentive viewer to understand the deeper symbolism that does not consist of physical work, but the mental attitude that drives each day. The clouds play a decisive role as they blow up the usual line of sight and draw the viewer into a dream world. The white clouds in their misty vagueness, without a fixed place and without a fixed outline, symbolize the inner engine of hope in a beautiful metaphoric way.

Thong’s art deals with profound issues that affect humanity and society at large but always maintains a particularly sharp focus on the cultural and social issues most pertinent to his home country. Thong says, “Even if I am nominally the creator of my paintings, these creations are just a reflection of the Vietnamese society of which I am a part; a society which is able to survive great difficulties through its immense powers of hope and optimism.” With his latest series, Thong once again demonstrates the impressive power of hope as the driving force of mankind. A quality that is uniquely ever-present in the Vietnamese people who have continued to retain their hope through many decades of difficult and often tragic experiences