This set of artworks were painted in the early 1970s, when Hanoi was experiencing the peak of American bombing. Tran Trung Tin developed a private visual language to express his feelings of isolation and despair during this dark time. Painted in vivid, distinctive colour, his abstract works may be among the first abstracts to be painted in north Vietnam. The abstracts also evoke the chaos of the city, as well as acting as indices of Tin’s internal state. Officially, abstraction and experimental modernism were banned from public display during this period in Vietnam, as artists were required to paint Socialist Realist images intended to raise morale. Tran Trung Tin painted in private, using newspaper and whatever paints he could get hold of. His works could not be publicly shown in Vietnam until the late 1980s.
