It’s been more than ten years since the days wandering about with friends on bus trips quick to and from linking up cries of highland birds with those of littoral gulls. Then waves’ words hardly vanished than were heard springs’ tunes rushing in. Delightful like a licentious wind. Continue reading →

Prize awarded in 1962 Saigon Spring Exhibition, at Saigon First International Fine Arts Exposition. Graduated from the Fine Arts National Academy in 1963, then from the Painting Pedagogy Faculty in 1964. Selected for the Young Artists International Bi-Annual at the Paris Modern Arts Museum, for the Tunis International Exposition, Washington Exposition in 1964. Instructor at the Hue Fine Arts School from 1967 to 1968. Saigon French Institute Exposition in May 1970. Continue reading →

… It is not because he has seen through the hidden precariousness of the borderland between life and death, out and home, light and dark, Dinh Cuong is said by some as a painter “romanticist”. Probably. But “romantic” world should not be understood as mere “willows leaning before veil screens and the moonlighting the alley-end!” Dinh Cuong’s small paintings I happened to see this spring are worlds that I much hesitate walking in. One should be ready, be cautious. Beware of the unforeseeable. It’s like in a mystifying space from a corner a dot of lightflashing up, in a quiet zone a stroke of brush suddenly jetting out, expanding, tottering, and stampeding towards the un-fathomable. Dinh Cuong’s person is much meeker than hispaintings. But they are “harsh” where they are least expected. Continue reading →

I awfully love that lifestyle, Dinh Cuong’s, quiet and amiable, cherishing an indulging loneliness. Continue reading →

He is gone like the Fish of freshwater
His dreamy painting is gone like the Sojourn of the
. . . Sojourner
Who displays his order and declines
On the mode of the Double Reverse Continue reading →

It was a time when it was awfully troublesome for him who wondered how he could express his wish to rid himself of the yoke of the old rules. Which rules remain today for him to rid himself of Everything has become too easy in these atrocious times when common decency says he should in Rome do as Romans do, when abuses are a means to the end, when insanity seems to sell well, and when revolution itself amuses and enriches the rich and starves the poor whom it leaves each time all the more starved. Amidst all that frivolous din Dinh Cuong’s painting amazes somewhat by its timorous look. Continue reading →