Duy Phuc Nguyen
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Duy Phuc Nguyen lives and paints in a downtown Montreal loft in the heart of the city’s old fur district. His view looks onto a former factory with dirty windows and rusted panes which many would see as blight; Duy Phuc, however, sees only beauty.
“People might find this view ugly, but if you look at it a different way, the rust and dirt become a beautiful texture and colour,” he says, touching on the two fundamental principles of his work. Duy Phuc’s path to downtown Montreal and his delight in urban “ugliness” began in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), where he was born in 1976 and lived until he was eight. His family has always had an active interest in the arts, and Duy Phuc learned to play a traditional Vietnamese monochord, or single-stringed instrument, when he was very young. He performed while living in Vietnam and later when he moved to the Montreal area with his family, but he was never entirely comfortable on the stage. His artistic bent turned instead toward painting and the peaceful solitude it offers. He learned basic techniques in private lessons with a local artist as a teenager and quickly became very skilled at portraits and landscapes, showing in several group events. The maturity and depth of that early work shows Duy Phuc’s caliber of talent, but he wasn’t content staying in the figurative world. In his early twenties, his work became increasingly abstract, the style he works in today. Although he kept his work very private, his close friends and family increasingly urged him to go public and, in October, 2003, Duy Phuc had his first solo exhibition in Montreal’s art district. He hasn’t looked back since. |
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