Where Is My Ego? 2 Painting

With the figures in Duong Thuy’s paintings, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to use ordinary words of beauty. He is not seeking to capture or portray their conventional beauty. They are distorted forms, twisted, eccentric, and intertwined. On the other hand, he depicts human beings in a strange state, with distorted limbs, weighted down, mouths wide open in screams, conveying a sense of darkness, emotions, or threat, unraveling and haunting, like their own delusions and nightmares. Whether Thuy paints landscapes or figurative images, they both carry two hues: signaling something, seemingly not joyful, about to happen, and secondly, the hidden repressed emotions, loneliness, sadness, isolation, and pain… representing the shared fate of human beings. Anyone looking at his paintings will see the “nightmares” occurring within their own everyday lives, not just in dreams.