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| Returning to behold the sky in my garden |
Dang Mau Tuu doesn’t paint Hue gardens filled with fragrant flowers and sweet fruits, but he paints the calmness of people in ancient gardens. In his paintings, gardens not only have trees but also give shades for recollections and preserve the leisurely pace of life in Hue.
In public eyes, Hue is often depicted as a place, light purple in color, with lengthened rains and the Perfume river flowing as slowly as a poetry line which is forgotten. But to a man who lives in the ancient capital like Dang Mau Tuu, Hue isn’t merely a former imperial capital, but a mystical garden where nature and people blend. It is the city that nourishes his art. In his paintings like “Mua hoa cai ben song”, “Gap em di le sang som nay”, “No thi nhan”, “Mua hoa phuong vy” are surreal Hue gardens filled with memories. The Hue garden can be found through the girl, the window, the cloud, or the sunset.
Hue gardens in Dang Mau Tuu’s paintings are the combination of poetry and painting, reality and memory.
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| Birds singing in the ancient garden |
In the painting “Tieng chim vuon cu”, Dang Mau Tuu doesn’t merely paint the garden; he paints his nostalgia for Hue embodied by the green color and the standing figure of a girl in a deep green ao dai listening to or following the birds singing in the distance. The painting is wrapped in green color, evoking both the feelings of freshness and distance like shattered pieces of the old garden in memory. Yellow and earthy brown colors are added, representing scattered rays of sunset among leaves, suggesting the soft melancholy of the afternoon in Hue. The artist doesn’t paint birds, but lets the viewer feel their singing. That is the subtlety of expressive art: painting the unseen so the viewer may feel. The birdsong here is not present-day sounds, but a call from the past. “Tieng chim vuon cu” is a visual poem, where invisible sounds, quiet memory, and nature merge in a very Hueish manner.
Kim Long, well known for its beam houses with Areca palms, green hedges, and bell sounds from pagodas, is depicted not descriptively, but emotionally. It can be recognized by a lane, a tiled roof, a trellis of flowers, and a path leading into a private realm, “the realm of Hue gardens”. His colors do not remain static; they move and blend. It is as if the sunlight is broken by the wind on moist ground. That is not merely a painting of a Hue garden; it’s a painting of the soul of sunlight. There, sunlight becomes emotion, which only those who deeply love Hue can understand: radiant, profound, and thoughtful.
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| Sunlight in Kim Long gardens |
The Hue garden in Dang Mau Tuu’s paintings is not to display but for people to hide themselves. It’s just like Hue people who lead quiet gentle lives. His paintings captivate the viewer not by shouting colors, but by the dreamy calm world, half real, half surreal.
I always remember the painting “Ve lai nhin troi o khu vuon nha minh”. It’s the lively beauty of the dream of returning to one’s homeland. The painting opens up a lush garden. There, a woman in a white ao dai is lying on the grass with her arms resting over her head as if she’s opening her heart to the sky above the leafy canopy. Her body is stretching in a relaxing way after a very long journey. It is as if she were dissolving herself into nature, which is possible only in one’s home. The painting is the reflection on faithfulness.
In a world disturbed by velocity and technology, Dang Mau Tuu’s paintings of Hue gardens are invitations to return, not to a specific place, but toward the inside. The Hue garden in his paintings is a symbol of memory, a lifestyle in harmony with nature which has been preserved now and forever.