WPG Artist Nuong Van-Dinh Tran, monotypes, serigraphs, and mezzotints

Red Hibiscus

Red Hibiscus
with Buds

A Dry Night-Blooming Cereus

Ling Ling in Autumnal Dream

Snow Pattern On The Gate

Lotus In Nirvana

Flying to Halloween Convention

The Phoenix

After Last March Snow Storm

Ms. Liberty, USA, At Sunset

Impression

Nuong Van-Dinh Tran, a Fine Art artist, was trained as a painter and a printmaker at the Corcoran School of Art, and earned her MFA at the George Washington University.

A native of VietNam, she comes from a culture in which natural elements represent a wide array of deeper cultural motifs and emotions. This exhibition, Nature and Feeling, demonstrates her ongoing attempt to connect these motifs to her adopted country. In her work, traditional Vietnamese elements and significances abound, ranging from the precise placement of a tree branch to the particular hue of a flower. As Nuong’s work shows, the Vietnamese Tinh (feeling) and Canh (landscape) co-exist to comprise a whole element.

In Nuong’s work, common Western subjects — a clapboard house, a picket fence, even the Statue of Liberty — gain greater depth and meaning through their connection to an Eastern visual shorthand. This is particularly true of An Old Oak Tree in Winter, the lead work for this exhibition. In it, Nuong seamlessly blends traditional Vietnamese elements with a common American subject. The painting depicts an oak that grows so close to Nuong’s home that the branches of the tree seem to embrace the house. Like a faithful friend, the old oak tree provides Nuong and her family with refreshing shade in the summer. Its robust branches have grown higher than the roof of the house, making it appear as though the tree is protecting the house and family. In Asian tradition, age confers respectability and dignity; thus the oak tree has, in a sense, earned a place in the home. It is a part of the family.

Nuong Van-Dinh Tran, a Founding Member of the Washington Printmakers Gallery, has her work featured in The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The National Museum of American Art, The Smithsonian Institution, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Library of Congress Fine Prints Collection, the Permanent Collection of the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and in many private collections.