Mai Dai Luu (b. 1983, Nam Dinh) received his BFA in 2012 and MFA in 2015 from the Fine Arts University in Hanoi. Before attending art school, he worked various jobs, including watching parked motorbikes at cafés, to support his education. What emerges from his work is both physical and mental resilience. Around seven years ago, while his contemporaries were beginning to gain recognition, Luu remained a struggling painter. Yet he stayed committed to his practice. In recent years, he has held solo exhibitions every two years, each showcasing large-scale paintings, a rhythm that reflects stamina, persistence and focus.
Luu often paints in a highly colorful, sensual manner, expressing desires for connection, for bodies, and for what might be called the erotic fullness of life. There is always a presence of intimacy and sexuality in his work, a persistent male-female longing. Even behind the flowers he paints, one often glimpses the outline of a lover, or a suggestion of romance. Amidst nature and the radiant beauty of life, romantic love is never absent. His practice, existing at the intersection of autobiography and Vietnamese history, explores how certain yearnings, spiritual desires, and beliefs are projected onto natural elements, flowers, fields, the landscape itself, as extensions of memory and emotional life. With references to Vietnamese history, Luu’s expansive body of work channels a kind of solar energy, both within the human body and the larger structures of the world.
He has exhibited widely across Vietnam and Southeast Asia, and his work is included in both public and private collections, notably the Imago Mundi Collection in Italy.