Looking back, I’ve known and hung out with Dinh Phong perhaps for almost twenty years. And, strangely, he’s always hidden his identity as an artist for so many years. Many friends of ours and I myself never know that he draws, that day after day he immerses himself in this world of his dreams, creating his multidimensional world by way of collecting, reading, and sketching.
This closed, isolated journey draws big taut circles which gradually grow smaller and smaller and ripen until the stage of “bursting from the cocoon” after which the whole thing soars like surreal dreams. That’s the reason why Dinh Phong’s paintings reveal full ecstasy of colours and his pictures seem to throw open, unfasten the manifold overlapping conflicts, expanding to the utmost the borders of borders. Picture after picture, with different hues of colours and flying degrees, give us a whole array of complex emotions, both strange and familiar…
It had been always that way until the moment Phong decided to step out into the light. Once, I visited him and was shown, on the desk of his room, all the big volumes on painting, the catalogs by the names of leading painters including Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Edouard Manet, Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Salvador Dali, etc. It turned out that he had quietly spent several decades just reading fine arts books and studying painting. And he has traveled to many countries around the world, visiting many museums and libraries just to look at pictures, to meditate, to search for materials on painting.
In particular, Dinh Phong wholeheartedly delved into the world of two great artists who had gone through extremely complex lives, such that their works were pushed to the shores of raging sublimation, Willem de Kooning and Gauguin. Their colours come close to communion with death. In Vietnam, he met and collected paintings by artists like Nguyen Tu Nghiem, Tran Luu Hau, Tran Hai Minh…

It’s hard to imagine that during the last six months, like under the spell of a colourful hurricane, the artist separated from his friends and the rhythm of everyday life to immerse himself in the world of painting. In order not to drop or lose the rhythm of thought, the constantly moving flow of colours, sometimes he would even eat while drawing. Or, anxious for her husband’s health, his wife would come down to the workshop to feed him each spoonful of rice. The pictures are born in such a mystical rhythm! And it’s clear that God challenges each artist in a different way. That makes the amazing and unexpected beauty of the finished works.
Each of his works is like a broken piece from the artist’s surreal dreams. And, put together, they create a world of coloured blocks that move freely and weave their way gently in the dreams of the ‘flying man’.
“Sometimes I feel from my heart a creative joy like a flash of electricity shining in my mind. I’d lock myself in my room, pick up the brush to sketch all the ideas that come up in my mind. Isn’t this just creativity? It is also a passion, a strong passion that motivates me to want to realize, wants to let everyone see, share and feel my surreal dreams,” he once told me as we drank together.
Dinh Phong passionately draws and composes using many different materials, such as acrylic colour on canvas, bronze statues, and glazed ceramic. This is the first time the artist holds a brush and a trowel, and yet, with his in-depth knowledge of painting principles and his innate metaphysical rational mind, his works bear almost no signs of ‘amateurism’.
Dinh Phong’s sculptures looked simple at first, and yet if you spend some time to contemplate them and speculate about them, you will find them quite strange and unique. Those are overlapping blocks, hidden words. For example, the “Enlightenment” is like a new religious banner. It is a taut line, evoking the image of respectfully clasping hands in the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara with a thousand hands and eyes. It is the sacred leaves of the Bodhisattva tree crowning Buddha as He contemplates the universe and attains the Enlightenment. It is an image of the sacred fire of wisdom and consciousness.
In “Empty”, a new sculpture, he focuses on looking for the emptiness inside. Life is actually void, emptiness. We established for ourselves frameworks, prejudices, we choke and block ourselves for what we do is merely to heap upon us even more and more concepts.
To re-use a remark by art critic Nguyen Quan:
“Two-dimensional layouts, three-dimensional spaces, connecting lines, changes of volume and rhythm, very mature, well-thought-out shapes. The freedom, the unfulfilledness is more evident in the 3D ceramic and bronze sculptures but still preserves the overall consistency of form”.
I have noticed that in many of his works Dinh Phong focuses on the factor of expanding linkages. He builds a flying model that evokes the creative imagination. He detects dual interactive models, potential deconstructive gravity of peripheral regions and does not emphasise centrality. Apparently, the centre has been exhausted if not dying altogether due to the obsolete, senile formalism and subjectivism. Peripheral calls for radiance with its youthful, yet-to-formed qualities. Or the mazes that have not died on their own because of fame and revelation.
The works of Dinh Phong in many ways are highly interactive, interwoven, intertwined. For example, pictures of wild dreams, multi-faceted, multi-dimensional statues can be turned upside down to reveal their multiple forms and personalities. The audience are offered the opportunity of immediately choosing for themselves an attitude with which to enjoy art, without following an available, well-trodden tunnel or monotonous one-way spirits, the poverty of which can be seen at the first glance.
After the great success of the exhibition “The Flying Man and his Surreal Dreams” in Hanoi (11.2020) which showcased to the art lovers and artists in the North, Dinh Phong will hold an exhibition of “Surreal Dreams” at Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts in mid-April.
Hopefully, he will make a new and spectacular breakthrough again with painters and art lovers from the South.
Saigon, March 14, 2021
Nguyen Huu Hong Minh