Quynh Vu is a visual artist based in North Carolina, USA. She graduated from Wake Forest University in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in studio art. Much of her work reflects the continuous process of attempting to understand her identity as a Vietnamese American woman, an identity that invokes strong sentiments towards both Western and Vietnamese culture and history. Working primarily in 2-D, Vu directly faces the lasting impressions of Western influence on modern social dynamics.
The most recent installation featured is Softened Scars by artist Quynh Vu. In the past couple of years, Vu has encountered a revelatory rift in her process, making a conceptual shift that affects the marrow of meaning in her work.
Earlier in her practice, Vu was deeply involved with the traumatic residuum caused by French imperialism on her native land and people of Vietnam. As a first-generation Vietnamese American, the scars inflicted upon her ancestors have altered her history and ideations of identity. In processing these inflictions, Vu created work that rebelliously reclaimed, as opposed to rejecting, the aesthetics and visual by-products of Western infringement. An example of this time in her practice, Commie Madonnie, a depiction of an unruly and admirably Communist Madonna will be on view at the escalator base in the Robert Haywood Morrison Atrium. Also on view, are her most recent oil paintings on mylar that sacralize mundane moments in the spaces she is surrounded by each day, and ink drawings of the lighthearted characters and images that take up real estate in her mind. With a deepened commitment to her artistic practice and new territory to roam, Vu imagines fresh subject matter as a salve, calling attention to the ephemeral present.