Uyen Tieu [pronounced wen tee-yoo] is an American artist born in Wichita, Kansas and raised in the bayous of the Deep South and in Silicon Valley. Uyen lives and works in her forever home, New York City.
Born to Vietnamese War refugees, Ivy League educated, a painter and a corporate executive, Uyen explores the juxtapositions and curiosities of being divided among different worlds. Her oil paintings combines a cubist and figurative approach, creating paintings by reducing elements to angular forms yet still tethering the painting to an observed object or figure.
Trained in the Bauhaus way of thinking, her paintings are rooted in constructing 3D models and geometric color. Her “Hidden Objects” series plays on this approach by wrapping vessels and forms in crinkled paper, to construct and paint observed objects with geometric shapes and shadows. In her “Forms and Figures” series, she took portraits of daily family life and fragmented the figures and embedded them in colored blocks.
Uyen has a BA from Yale University where she studied with artist and educator Robert Reed and is a member at The Art Students League where she studied with renowned abstract artists Larry Poons and Charles Hinman.
StatementI often find myself straddling a lot of different worlds and needing to make sense of them and work on how to exist purposefully in the different worlds. Juxtapositions and curiosities to hold two different perspectives at the same time is a concept that I explore and investigate in my works.
In investigating and exploring, my medium is painting. I paint because I like looking at things for a long time. Eventually, if something catches my eye, I start having thoughts on how colors have shapes, what if objects had feelings and what if the feelings could be seen.
It is nice to look at something and tell yourself a story. Creating paintings is a way that I like to invite others to spend time with their thoughts and tell themselves a story.
NY
CountryUSA
