I was born in Bangkok, Thailand, to Vietnamese parents. My family and I moved to the Chicago area when I was 12. After facing the challenges of adapting to a new culture and language, I earned my Bachelor’s degree at Northern Illinois University, followed by my Master’s degree in Painting at New York Academy of Art in 2007. Since then, I have been working in my small studio in New York City and in Connecticut where I keep a studio to work on larger paintings. My wife, a public-school teacher, and I live with our two daughters in Harlem.
Oil on canvas is my preferred medium, though I have also had seasons of my career that are all about drawing. My work has evolved from figurative, which was the focus of my classical instruction at the New York Academy of Art, to partial abstraction, to pure abstraction.
Sometimes, I will use something I have seen as a reference for a painting or as a point of departure. Other times, a painting is started simply with an urge to use certain colors, shapes, lines, or even more abstractly, movements or rhythms. Regardless of how each painting is started, intuition and a moment’s instinct are what I rely on to direct each move. To me, a successfully finished painting must be a far departure from what I had imagined it to be. Spontaneity and surprises are what excites me about painting; the bigger my surprise, the better the painting.