Bao Vuong: Derrière les vagues – Museum of Asian Arts, France

Bao Vuong was born in 1978 in Vietnam, after the end of the war. In 1979, when he was still an infant, his family fled the country by boat, like thousands of other boat people. This sea voyage, marked by wandering and uncertainty, left an indelible mark on his family history.

Training and First Artistic Steps
Arriving in France with his family, Bao Vuong grew up in the south of the country. He pursued an academic career at the Toulon School of Fine Arts, where he began to explore memory and identity through art. He continued his training at the Avignon School of Fine Arts, where he deepened his research on materiality and the emotional impact of textures and colors.
After his studies, he first worked as a special needs educator, dedicating himself to supporting young people in difficulty. This experience profoundly influenced his worldview and informed his thinking on resilience, transmission, and the memory of trauma.

Return to Vietnam and Immersion in Creation
In 2012, Bao Vuong decided to return to Vietnam, his home country, to reconnect with his heritage and devote himself fully to his art. This immersion in Vietnamese culture led him to explore the notions of loss, exile, and transmission through various mediums. He exhibited his first works in alternative spaces and galleries
in Ho Chi Minh City, notably A.Farm x Villa Saigon, where he was noted for his powerful memorial installations.
During this period, he began to develop his emblematic series The Crossing, which was directly inspired by the stories of boat people and his own family history. He experimented with working with the material by sculpting paint with a knife, evoking the agitation of the sea and the memory of night crossings. The first paintings in this series were shown at Galerie Quynh and Manzi Art Space in 2017-2018.

Return to France and International Recognition
In 2019, Bao Vuong moved to Paris, where his career rapidly took off. His first solo exhibition in France, The Crossing at A2Z Art Gallery in 2020, met with critical acclaim. The eponymous series, composed of deep black canvases, incised and scarified to reveal the underlying light, marked a turning point in his work and affirmed his artistic identity.
Since then, he has held solo and group exhibitions in France and internationally, notably in Venice, Singapore, Shanghai, New York, Geneva, and Brussels. His work is exhibited in prestigious institutions such as the Wilmotte Foundation in Venice, the Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain in Brussels, and the Departmental Museum of Asian Arts in Nice. He has also participated in numerous international art fairs, including Art Paris, Asia Now, Art Geneva, ART SG, Art Basel Hong Kong, and ART021 Shanghai.

A work between memory and light
Through his works, Bao Vuong questions the invisible, traumatic memory and resilience. His painting is a dialogue between shadow and light, a space where memory slowly surfaces on the surface of the canvas. The use of black, often associated with loss and forgetting, becomes for him a place of revelation, where light emerges as a fragile but tenacious hope.
His work is now evolving towards a more in-depth exploration of materials: tar, gold leaf, jars, votive papers, incense, clothing… all elements that anchor his works in a ritual and spiritual dimension. Each exhibition is conceived as a journey, a passage between the visible and the invisible, between silence and reminiscence.