meet Nguyen Thi Tam
Nguyen Thi Tam is one of Vietnam’s foremost living artists. She was born in 1936, raised in Saigon and was the top graduate from Gia Dinh College of Fire Arts of Sai Gon and Pedagogy in the Drawing and Training Course in 1959. There she studied under its director, Le Van De, who himself had been first laureate of the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Hanoi in 1930, later studied in Paris, and won the prize of the Salon Officiel des Artistes Français. Her artistic studies included oil painting, sculpture, architecture, lacquer painting, silk painting, and collage.
Mme. Tam decided early in her career that she wanted to paint landscapes on silk. While silk paintings trace their revered roots back to the XVth century and held the same high esteem as ink drawings in China, the older silk painters had concentrated their work on people. Mme. Tam wanted to paint the beauty of her country. While initially painting her landscapes in oil on canvas, she spent much time developing her own technique in the manipulation of the surface of the fine silk surface so that it lent itself to the plein air style of painting. No longer did she have to wait for the water colors to “absorb and condense,” as she says. She was able to travel her entire country to paint its landscapes without losing the soft, velvety quality and luminosity requisite of fine traditional silk paintings. Her new technique allowed her to complete a painting in one sitting.
Nguyen Thi Tam has always been a teacher as well as an artist. She spent many years on teaching Composition and Decoration Course before 1975 and as the Deputy Dean of Graphic Arts Department – Univerity of Fine Arts of Ho Chi Minh City after 1975. She has also taught over 300 students how to paint in oils and on silk privately. Many of her students have gone on to establish significant careers as artists themselves. Mme. Tam and her husband, fellow artist Nguyen Long Son, founded the Son-Tam Art Studio in 1990, where they instruct as many as 30 students at a time, trekking from one end of Vietnam to the other, sketching and painting scenes of every possible subject from the streets of ancient Hoi An, to the waterfall of Da Lat, to the Cockfight Rocks at Ha Long Bay, etc. Included among the pupils have been numerous gifted young people with hearing and speech impairments.
Mme. Tam has, throughout her artistic life, been very involved in the fine arts community of Saigon. She is a member of the Vietnam Fine Arts Association and the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Association. She is the founder and former chairwoman of the Green Bamboo Fine Arts Club in Ho Chi Minh City, and the chairwoman of the Fine Arts Club for Women, an ancillary group of the Ho Chi Minh City Fine Arts Association. She is also known widely for her great humanitarian spirit, vis-à-vis spearheading many fundraising exhibitions, throughout the years, for orphans, the handicapped, the underprivileged and victims of Typhoon Linda. Mme. Tam is considered by many to be a national treasure.
Nguyen Thi Tam has been exhibited extensively over the years from the north to the south of Vietnam and abroad, including Boston, MA, Washington D.C., Arlington, VA, Houston, TX in the U.S.A.; China, Thailand, Cambodia, France (many times), Germany, Switzerland and Belgium. Her work has not only been collected the world over, but has been purchased by and hangs in the Ho Chi Minh Museum of Fine Arts, the Hanoi Museum of Fine Arts, Hoi An Old Quarter Museum, Southern Women Museum and the Vatican.
