The Artist

1947 Nam Ha Province Vietnam

Do Thi Ninh is one of the Doi Moi generation of artists which emerged in the early 1980s which included fellow artist Dang Thi Khue, who as strong independent women spent years following the Ho Chi Minh Trail, actively involved in the country’s independence movement. Ninh is an independent artist, solitary and determined to make her own way in this world.

Ninh graduated from the Vietnam Fine Arts University, Hanoi in 1966. She especially admired the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch and was influenced by his works of intense color, semi-abstraction and oblique styling. Although trained in the Socialist Realism style and classical Western anatomy, Ninh developed her own expressionist style with strong colors and shifting forms. Ninh paints her moods, her memory, her village, pagodas, temples, places of spiritual life and childhood. Ninh has opened to the world, yet returned to village culture. A return to the inner world is a feature of Doi Moi, of self-liberation, compared to the Socialist Realism that previously dominated art in Vietnam.

Ninh was active for years in the Vietnam Fine Arts Association and participated in local and international exhibitions. Her works are in the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum, Hanoi, Vietnam, and in collections in Singapore, France, Hong Kong, and Sweden.