Lê Thanh Minh is a distinguished representative of contemporary Vietnamese artists who consistently cherish and revive nostalgic values imbued with an Eastern spirit within their pictorial world.
He demonstrates originality and artistic creativity in even the smallest details, often drawing inspiration from objects that are ordinary and seemingly insignificant: a broken bottle, an oil lamp, a few worn playing cards, a temple wooden bell, a crumpled book, a torn banknote, or a chipped Bát Tràng ceramic plate. Lê Thanh Minh believes that beauty lies hidden within the most humble things, and that the artist’s mission is to discover these latent beauties and express them through the language of painting.
His brushwork is meticulously refined, reminiscent of classical Renaissance painting, yet it remains subtle, contemporary, and fresh. The objects in his paintings appear vivid and lifelike, as if emerging directly from lived reality. In this regard, the renowned Russian artist T. Salakhhov once remarked that Lê Thanh Minh’s special talent lies in placing completely opposing objects and details side by side; although each element is rendered with clarity, together they create a sense of ambiguity—vast, hazy, and expansive—so much so that one feels the painting is about to overflow the delicate surface of the canvas and soar freely into the boundless heights of creative imagination.
Often hailed as a “magician artist” capable of transforming inanimate objects into forms imbued with soul, Lê Thanh Minh demonstrates outstanding mastery in pictorial composition and, in particular, an exceptional command of color. To evoke classical beauty and the golden echoes of the past embedded within objects—resonances of a bygone era—he favors palettes imbued with nostalgia: somber tones, archaic hues, and a painting approach that leans toward intuition and subtle estrangement.
The task of the artist, in his view, is to encode mysterious artistic messages through unique aesthetic symbols. Lê Thanh Minh achieves this through a distinctive and enigmatic visual language that opens up vast fields of association, while still preserving the inherent simplicity of objects and conveying them to the viewer in a deeply captivating manner.
Lê Thanh Minh was born in 1951 and graduated from the Surikov State Academic Institute of Fine Arts (former Soviet Union) in 1992. He is a founding member of the Vietnam Literature and Arts Association in Russia, a founding member of the magazine Nguoi Ban Duong (The Fellow Traveler), and a member of the Vietnam Fine Arts Association. With significant contributions to the development of contemporary Vietnamese fine arts, many of his works have been exhibited internationally, including a painting exhibition at the Moscow Railway Cultural Palace in Russia in 1994.
