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BUI Xuan Phai DANG Thu Huong DANG Tran Tu Thu DO Tuan Anh Faivre d'arcier Virginie Lawrence DATTILIO LE Huy Hoang LE Quoc Viet LE Vo Tuan NGUYEN Duc Dung NGUYEN Duc Tu NGUYEN Duy Linh NGUYEN Nghia Phuong NGUYEN Quang Thang
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Born: 1920 - 1988 in Hanoi. Was famous at home and abroad. Graduated from the Indochina Fine Arts College, 15th entering class (1941-1946). Specialized in oil painting and gouache. Was influenced by the Paris School of Painting. He greatly succeeded in finding the beauty of old Hanoi and expressed it with dense, diverse and highly expressive colours. Bui Xuan Phai portraits are strongly affecting. He was also an outstanding illustrator. Began to paint streets and participated in the Tokyo Exhibition when he still was a student of the Indochina Fine Arts College. Many of his paintings are in private collections in Vietnam and in foreign countries.

Bui Xuan Phai is thought as a composite of paradoxes. It seems that this great artist always tried to reduce himself to smaller dimensions. The influences of French masters are indefinable in his paintings. Technically speaking, it can be said that Bui Xuan Phai is really a representative of Paris school in Vietnam. However, the climate of his painting is impregnated to saturation with national character. Place any Phai - be it still life or old street, scene of Cheo or nude - besides works of European artists, and you will see that that Vietnamese quiddity, that Vietnamese spirit is unmistakable.
Prize-winner at the National Fine Arts Exhibition, 1946.
Lecturer at the Fine Arts College of Vietnam, 1956 and 1957.
Prize-winner at the National Fine Arts Exhibition in 1980.
First individual show in Hanoi, 1984.
Three individual posthumous shows in 1989, 1990 and 1992.
Prize-winner for the illustration of the book He Cheo (National Theatre's Clown) in Leipzig.
The best known of all Vietnamese modern painters, Bui Xuan Phai is respected and admired for both his art and moral character. He epitomizes for the Vietnamese the lone artist suffering for his art: he lost his teaching position at the Hanoi College of Fine Arts in 1957 for supporting a movement for political and cultural freedom and was not allowed to show his work in public until a solo exhibition in 1984. Nicknames "Phai Pho" (street-painting Phai) for his many evocative street scenes of Hanoi, Phai also captured with evident affection Cheo (Vietnamese opera) actresses and musicians backstage and in performance. As early as the 1950s he experimented with abstraction but did not sign these forbidden works, showing them only to family and friends.
The best known of all Vietnamese modern painters, Bui Xuan Phai is respected and admired for both his art and moral character. He epitomizes for the Vietnamese the lone artist suffering for his art: he lost his teaching position at the Hanoi College of Fine Arts in 1957 for supporting a movement for political and cultural freedom and was not allowed to show his work in public until a solo exhibition in 1984. Nicknames "Phai Pho" (street-painting Phai) for his many evocative street scenes of Hanoi, Phai also captured with evident affection Cheo (Vietnamese opera) actresses and musicians backstage and in performance. As early as the 1950s he experimented with abstraction but did not sign these forbidden works, showing them only to family and friends.
Bui Xuan Phai was one of the few Vietnamese artists who kept a meticulous archive of his works, and maintained a private diary of all his thoughts. The monologue explores almost every aspect of his life, and is mainly set in the period between1964-1984 in Hanoi (the period of transition and upheaval in the country). Each scene focuses on an aspect of his life, from his views on artistic integrity and fame to his family life to a scene of the Vietnamese satirical form of opera, Cheo theatre.

 
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