Artist Vu Manh Tan – Vietnamese Oil Paintings – Nguyen Art Gallery

The Journey into Art

Artist Vu Manh Tan (born July 3, 1975) was born in Doan Xa Village, Hong Phong Commune, Dong Trieu Town, Quang Ninh Province. In 1997, he graduated from the University of Industrial Fine Arts, one of Vietnam’s most influential institutions, renowned for nurturing generations of artists and designers with a distinctive creative imprint.

Upon leaving the academy, he did not immediately follow a purely painterly path. With an open-minded outlook, keen sensitivity, and strong foreign-language skills, Vu Manh Tan turned toward the tourism sector, working first as a tour guide and later as a tour leader, accompanying international travelers across Vietnam and throughout the Indochina region. Those years of constant movement endowed him with a profound reservoir of lived experience: diverse landscapes, human rhythms, cultural encounters, and quietly resonant everyday emotions. All of these accumulated silently, like layers of sediment, forming a deep foundation for his later artistic practice.

The year 2007 marked a significant milestone when he became one of the founding shareholders of Viet Vision Travel and Nguyen Art Gallery, navigating in parallel the roles of entrepreneur and artist. Throughout this period, despite the demands of business, Vu Manh Tan persistently sustained his engagement with painting. He was also the founder of the Swan Cruise brand in Ha Long Bay, directly involved in conceptual design and the construction of numerous cruise vessels distinguished by their refined aesthetic sensibility—contributing to a more thoughtful and nuanced perception of tourism spaces within the heritage bay.

Following the disruptions brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, from 2019 onward, Vu Manh Tan returned to the visual arts with renewed focus and professional commitment. He left Hanoi and returned to Dong Trieu—his place of origin—to live and create. There, he established PaddyHome, a living and creative space of his own design, embodying his personal ethos and serving as a point of convergence between art, architecture, and nature.

Today, the majority of Vu Manh Tan’s works are created in Dong Trieu. His painting bears the imprint of a multi-layered life journey: the inward stillness that follows years of movement, and the mature vision of an artist shaped by diverse roles and cultural environments. His works are not loud; instead, they quietly open up spaces for breathing—where emotion, memory, and lived experience are distilled into form, color, and rhythm.

Artistic Activities