The series of Black Paintings by the late artist Nguyen Thai Tuan is a captivating collection of oil paintings where the human form is imbued with meaning through its absence. The enigma of the human body, its void, becomes intertwined with the mystery of painting itself. In these artworks, individual features are lost, submerged in darkness. This deliberate omission of human detail serves as a deliberate strategy employed by the artist. It calls into question our perceptions of the world and how we identify with it—whether through media, fashion, popular culture, or political trends. The black forms depicted in the paintings invite us to explore the possibilities of realty.

Nguyen Thai Tuan (b.Vietnam, 1965-2021) is a painter whose work is deeply rooted in the history and politics of Vietnam. Nguyen’s work is profoundly concerned with notions of memory, trauma, and the persistence of images. His paintings usually draw on actual events and real imagery, which he transforms and renders in ghostly, mysterious, and often monochromatic compositions. Nguyen’s paintings toy with our perception of time and events by refusing to use pure colours, never representing his character’s faces, and wilfully using effects that induce confusion. His visual language is structured around principles of duality and symmetry, between fullness and absence, appearing and fading, dream and reality, and personal and collective memories. His paintings question the structure and composition of a collective psyche and how it is, sometimes unconsciously, shaped by lingering images of societies’ most violent realities.