Vu Dan Tan’s was known for his unique and intriguing artistry of applying recycled and abandoned everyday materials to his works.
Vu Dan Tan was born in Hanoi, Vietnam in 1946. He is considered as one of the most important contemporary Vietnamese artists from the 1980s until his untimely death in 2009. The self-taught artist, together with his wife Natalia Kraevskaia, founded Salon Natasha in the 1990s, the first private experimental creative art space in Hanoi. He forged a new vocabulary and vocation for visual artists in Vietnam, and broke from the traditional Vietnamese beaux-arts tradition, creating multi-media cross-disciplinary practices.
Tan was known for his unique and intriguing artistry of applying recycled and abandoned everyday materials to his works, such as carton boxes. Tan’s work varied in scale and medium, from collages of cigarette packets, which he cut and painted to life-size temple and boat installations made of appliance boxes.
Vu Dan Tan’s Venuses--cut out corset armor made of card-board paper, have come to symbolize the artist’s works in the last decade of his life. His work has been widely exhibited and collected in countries such as France, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Finland, Japan, USA, Singapore and Vietnam.