Artist
thao nguyên
Graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Arts from Rennes 2 University in 2017, then a Master's degree in Arts Research in 2020, and a Professional Master's degree in Digital and Interactive Media for Cinema and Audiovisual in 2022, Thao Nguyên spent her youth surrounded by arts.
She is also the Art Director of Toucher Arts.
She is currently a professional graphic designer and photographer at a communication and event agency in Laval, and founder of an information center whose aim is to inform young Vietnamese about art studies in France and share knowledge of the arts from around the world.
During her life in France, she participated in many cultural events to promote Vietnamese culture, in order to strengthen the friendly relationship between France and Vietnam. Photography and art, taking up a large part of her daily and professional life, is for her the way to tell her own stories being an Asian artist who spends a large amount of her youth abroad.
Hôian
en rêve
ABOUT THE PHOTO
SERIES
Hôian en Rêve is the collection of photos that Thao Nguyên has taken since 2016 during her visit to the city of Hôian. This is where she saw her native country, Vietnam, with a visitor's eye: even the corner of the street interested her, with street vendors selling grilled corn, green bean cakes, and even snacks.
But what Thao Nguyên represents in this series is not simply photo-documentary as such. She specifies: “The photo-documentary is known for its fidelity to reality, from the scenes photographed to the color of the photos, but here, it is no longer that. I remember it was a cloudy day and the storm was on its way, so that was why my original photos were quite somber. But all of these couldn't stop me from showing the splendid city of Hoian of my dream in my photos. My photos are so edited sometimes they lose a bit of their previous image quality.” And there, she added her touch of color, very vibrant, and saturated, with a lot of dynamism that transforms her photos into hyper-realistic paintings.
With Hôian en Rêve, Thao Nguyên introduces her visitors to a city of Hôian with lots of colors, at different times of the day, a city where there is a mixture between the old and the new, between tourist activities and traditional works, between foreigners and locals. A city she had been dreaming of returning to.