Tag: Art Hotel

“Each painting must be felt and experienced as a thing in itself, not as a window looking onto another world but as a world of its own.”

Born in 1999, the painter Quoc Anh Le was raised between Hanoi, Hue and Ho Chi Minh City, where he is now based. Suitably displayed in the Anima Well Being Center, his calm and contemplative works are steadfastly abstract in nature, transmuting memory and emotion into inscrutable forms that defy any reductive explanation.

True to the Anima ethos, they can rarely be explained in concrete terms — instead, each painting must be felt and experienced as a thing in itself, not as a window looking onto another world but as a world of its own.

Consider the work titled System (2014), principally defined by black brushtrokes on a white background. The work is mixed media, featuring a variety of different paints, and the brushstrokes are wildly varied in nature, ranging from the brushy horizontal forms at the top left, to the solid black dot center left with thin straight lines radiating outwards, to the complex oblong forms center right and the forest of thin strokes running along the bottom. A single red crescent cuts through the composition near the bottom left like a rupture in the time space continuum, and a little bit of crossed out writing appears near the top and center of it all, teasingly hinting at meaning deferred.

It looks like a masterpiece of abstraction that you might expect from a 50 year old painter at his peak, but Quoc Anh painted it at the tender age of 25 and is just getting started.

“Let your instincts guide you, and find your own meaning within”

The large scale diptych Untitled (2023) in the dining room repeats the black, white and red color palette with bold sweeping forms which can only be described as powerful emotions expressed in paint, and the painting Sound II (2024) features a cacophony of black and white musical forms against a solid black background. A similar blackness dominates the entire painting Outrenoir (2023), but if you look closer you can see snippets of text hidden underneath the blackness — a recurring theme in the artist’s work, where meaning is always partial, hidden, alluded to but obscured. His work is a perfect expression of the Anima ethos: let your instincts guide you, and find your own meaning within.

“Bach was all alone in the studio with his paints and brushes, taking solace in the solitary act of creation when it seemed like the world was ending — a touching tribute to the power of art to sustain us and give our lives meaning against all odds.”

The Hanoi-based artist Bach Vu (born 1993) pursued a finance career in London before leaving that world behind and returning to Vietnam to follow in the footsteps of his father, the painter Thang Vu. He has two different bodies of work featured at Anima – the first being his black and white abstract triptych painting titled The endless drifting of an unconscious mind (2024), which greets guests from behind the reception in the lobby. With its dance of vaporous forms, the work is full of mystery and tension, alluding to the half-forgotten dreams and fantasies that simmer beneath the surface of the conscious mind. This work is in stark contrast to his other works that appear in the rooms, drawn from his Purple Rain series, which the artist painted in a mood of introspection in 2021, during the height of the Covid-19 epidemic in Vietnam.

The lockdowns in Hanoi in 2021 were quite intense, but Bach was deeply focused on painting at the time and was ignoring the outside world, with no internet, no SIM card, and no one around to talk to. Over a full week had passed after lockdowns were implemented when he finally emerged from his home and went for a walk – and it was only then, when he stepped outside into a ghost town, that he realized the severity of the situation. Walking down Tràng Tiền Street in Hanoi, he saw the most beautiful colors in the late afternoon sky and was inspired to paint the Purple Rain paintings, which are distinct from his normal painting style in that they are extremely minimal and formless, bordering on the style of color-field painting, except that the colors are distributed all around and never quite form fields per se.

Speaking about the song Purple Rain, The Artist Formerly Known As Prince said, “When there’s blood in the sky -red and blue equals purple… Purple Rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love, letting your faith/god guide you through.” Interestingly enough, although the world seemed to be ending during the COVID pandemic, Bach was all alone in the studio with his paints and brushes, taking solace in the solitary act of creation when it seemed like the world was ending – a touching tribute to the power of art to sustain us and give our lives meaning against all odds.

Coming from her background as a documentary filmmaker, the artist Mzung Nguyen (born 1982) has in recent years developed a visual art practice spanning sculpture, painting, collage and installation. Her works in the Anima Collection are all drawn from the series Đông Hải (“The East Sea”), featuring reconstituted newspaper and dead coral fragments mounted upon beds of steel mesh used in construction, creating works that fall somewhere in between painting and sculpture while referencing both human architecture and the natural ‘architecture’ of coral reefs.

In particular, she drew inspiration from artificially constructed coral reef armatures, which are being used to regenerate coral populations off the coast of Vietnam. Changes to the acid balance of the oceans due to climate change, as well as the proliferation of invasive species, are resulting in the phenomenon of “coral bleaching,” decimating the coral reefs which play a crucial role in propping up marine ecosystems, both literally and figuratively.

The Sea Itself (2025)

A layer of steel mesh covers the surface of the canvas, accented only by a few fragments of crushed coral. The sparse appearance of the coral is a silent reminder: the ocean is hurting, and the situation has reached an alarming level.

In other works such as The Sea-City and The City Itself (both created in 2025), Mzung uses the technique of restructuring newspaper: colorful paper scraps pressed tightly together, creating a chaotic and rhythmic surface like the non-stop noise of urban life.
Sharing about this series of works, she writes:

“Here, the waves are not water, but information, consumption, speed, and desire. I use the imagery of the sea and waves to recall an ecological memory, and to reflect on our parasitic existence within the urban form — where nature is gradually being replaced by layers of artificial structure.”

Just like the tiny organisms that create coral reefs, each small piece of paper connects to form a work of art. And likewise, we ourselves contribute to breathing life into the shell known as the city.

“The implication overall is one of beauty emerging in spite of hardship.”

For many years, Le Phi Long (born 1988) has been exploring the history of French Colonialism in Vietnam through a series titled Đông Dương Lãng Du (“Wandering Indochina”), in which he developed a distinctive artistic voice, and a particular predilection for the colors blue, gold, and silver. On the one hand, the blue color is evocative of the chinese porcelain tradition, and by extension, the thousand year legacy of Chinese colonisation in Vietnam — and on the other hand, the gold and silver highlights which often pop up in his work are more in line with the belle epoch aesthetic indebted to the French. Playing around with such influences, Phi Long has carved out a distinctive aesthetic entirely of his own.

A number of works from his Đông Dương Lãng Du project can be found in the Anima collection, most notably his Lotus paintings, which focus on one of the most iconic flowers in the Vietnamese visual lexicon. Lotus flowers are significant within the Buddhist tradition, as Buddhist saints and gods are often depicted holding a lotus in hand, and the Buddha himself is often depicted seated upon a lotus blossom. Spiritually, the lotus signifies purity and the path to enlightenment — however in Phi Long’s lotus paintings, there is something dark and unnerving about the way he paints the flowers, in that they are not blooming on the tranquil surface of a pond (as is normally the case in nature), but rather, they are emerging from dry, bulbous roots, with no water in sight.

In Lotus 02 (2011), a grouping of lotus blossoms emerge from the anomalous root-bulbs (which subtly evoke the sort of vases in which a plucked lotus might be placed), and in the hazy background there is a cave, giving the sense that the flowers are coming out of a place of darkness. The implication overall is one of beauty emerging in spite of hardship.

Other Phi Long works in the Anima Collection were drawn from a later period in his practice, when he shifted his focus onto more universal themes — and yet, the same stylistic threads and color palette persist. These works, which are all from his Leisure series (2020-2024), are characterized by circular forms, some of them evoking celestial bodies in outer space, while others are more grounded in the terrestrial context, with circular forms made from wood, or vines perhaps — such as in the paintings Crown of Thorns no.1 & 2 (2020-2023), in which spiky thorns poke outwards from the circular loops at the center of each composition — and yet at the same time, bands of silver bind the circular forms, as if to suggest the indelible connection between desire and suffering. Furthermore, the circular forms evoke the infinite loop of the Yin-Yang symbol, while the spikes evoke Christ’s crown of thorns, expressing in a single image the two dominant spiritual regimes within Vietnam.

Notably, the guest rooms at Anima featuring Phi Long’s work have been embellished by the artist, who created site-specific sculptural detailing on the walls to amplify the impact of his pieces. Crucially, the plaster detailing is rough and partial, only covering parts of the walls — imaginary, bittersweet archeological remnants, bursting through into the present like rifts in time.