Vũ Giáng Hương

Biography

Vũ Giáng Hương’s father, the writer Vũ Ngọc Phan, and her mother, the poet Hằng Phương, raised a large family in Hanoi, and she was the eldest child. She was born on 23 January 1930. Of her seven younger siblings, many became well known: among her brothers are the academician Vũ Tuyên Hoàng and the plant protection specialist Vũ Triệu Mân.

She began drawing at about seven or eight. Her teachers are named as Tô Ngọc Vân and Trần Văn Cẩn, two prominent Vietnamese painters. Her training began in wartime: first came short courses in Thanh Hóa and in Việt Bắc, then regular classes in Hanoi. In Hanoi she studied in the silk painting department from 1955 to 1962; by other accounts her diploma was issued in 1960, and I would not smooth over the discrepancy. Silk became her main medium. Critics write about the poetry of everyday life in her work: the figures in her pictures are children, mothers, women of the people’s militia and young women volunteers. Her line is quick but quiet, and the colour shows faintly, as if through fabric. She took part in exhibitions in Vietnam and abroad; hundreds of her works survive, many of them in the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. Her awards include prizes at the national art exhibitions of 1960 and 1965, the main prize at the Hanoi capital art exhibition of 1965 and a prize at the exhibition of women artists in 1974.

From 1962 to 1988 she taught at the Hanoi fine arts institute, held senior posts there, up to deputy rector, and received the title of associate professor and that of Merited Teacher. In 1989 she became deputy and then general secretary of the Vietnam Fine Arts Association and stayed in that post for about ten years; by other accounts her term ran from 1989 to 1994. From 1999 to 2004 she was deputy chair of the National Committee of the Alliance of Arts and Literature Associations of Vietnam, and from April 2004 to September 2010 she chaired it.

In 2001 she was awarded the State Prize for literature and art. Her other honours include the Independence Order, second class, the Resistance Order against the Americans, second class, and the Labour Order, first class. Colleagues called her the “elder sister” of Vietnamese painting.

Her work was shown outside Vietnam: in 2005 at the exhibition of drawings from the American–Vietnam War at the Drawing Center in New York, and in 2012 at documenta (13) in Kassel.

She died in Hanoi on 20 August 2011. The funeral took place on 25 August. A few weeks earlier her memoir “Love and Art” had been published, and in November 2012 an exhibition, “Memory of Time”, marking the anniversary of her death was held in Hanoi.