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| Phan Vu Tuan beside one of his works. |
Phan Vu Tuan recalls: “When I had just graduated, all my classmates chose either Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City to establish their careers. A painting collector even promised to provide me with the best possible opportunities if I moved to Ho Chi Minh City. I knew that the big cities would offer me better conditions for living and pursuing my artistic work, but I was determined to choose Hue, as though it were my artistic destiny. I have now lived in Hue for 14 years. Although I still rent accommodation where I live and paint, I have built up a treasure of hundreds of paintings depicting Hue. For a young painter like me, that is an enormous spiritual wealth!”
Talking with Phan Vu Tuan, I realized that we share many things in common. We both grew up among rice fields and gardens, bamboo hedges, the smell of straw, and the floods that rise each year and leave lasting memories of our hometowns. Perhaps that is why, when looking at Tuan's paintings, I see not only landscapes but also life in its vivid, intimate reality. It is the life of old streets, bamboo groves, moss-covered rooftops and the quiet corners of the imperial citadel that people only notice when they slow down.
Tuan's Alla prima paintings are not created to showcase technical skill. Rather, they resemble watercolour diary pages, recording things that are gradually fading away. The urban landscape of Hue in his paintings is not noisy or bustling. The rural life in his paintings is not idealized. Everything is authentic and familiar, yet carries a certain fragility, as though a prolonged spell of rain could make it all dissolve into memory.
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| One of Phan Vu Tuan's paintings depicting Hue Imperial Citadel |
Tuan once said something that has stayed with me: “Every time I return to my hometown, I find myself missing Hue intensely, just as I missed my hometown so much when I first arrived in Hue…”. This longing reveals how the city has become an intimate part of the young painter's life. Hue does not try to hold anyone back, but once you have fallen in love with it, it is difficult to let go.
Phan Vu Tuan first picked up a paintbrush in 2012, while he was still a student at the University of Fine Arts in Hue. From his earliest paintings onwards, his work has revolved around two main subjects: his native village in Ha Tinh and Hue city. Tuan explains: “When I paint the countryside, I paint from memories of my midland village in Ha Tinh. During my childhood, the village still retained its rustic character and had not yet been covered in concrete as it is today. Bamboo groves, flocks of chickens and ducks, white egrets, buffaloes and cows, and even an ant nest on an ancient tree all appear slowly and peacefully in my paintings. As for Hue, I paint it through direct observation, guided by my love for this place. If you look closely, you will notice that all my paintings of Hue carry a certain sense of melancholy.”
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| One of Phan Vu Tuan's paintings depicting Hai Ba Trung High School. |
This is particularly evident in the paintings Tuan creates after observing Hue in the rain. Rain deepens the colors of time and brings the moss-covered marks on the citadel walls to life. Hue Imperial Citadel in Tuan's paintings is neither magnificent nor viewed through the lens of tourism. Instead, it emerges as a collective memory, at once distant and familiar, ancient yet intimately connected to everyday life.
“Only after living in Hue for a long time did I realize that the colors of its sky, the waters of the Huong River, and the changing moments of its four seasons – spring, summer, autumn and winter – each have their own distinctive flow and palette,” Tuan shares.
By choosing to remain in Hue, Phan Vu Tuan has devoted his love and patience to capturing the city's familiar landscapes in watercolour. Through the quiet, melancholic notes in his paintings, viewers may recognize a corner of Hue they have once walked through and grown fond of, a place they have carried with them in their memories. Art does not need to be loud to be remembered and cherished.