Hoi Lebadang

Floating Down the River, Lithograph by Hoi Lebadang

circa 1975

Lebadang was born in 1921 in Bich-La-Dong, a village along the Huong River in Quang-Tri Province of Hue, Vietnam. He expressed himself through a variety of media, including painting, watercolor, sculpture, jewelry and graphic works. He often combined various media, creating sculptural, highly textured artwork. “Life is a sinking ship and work is a lifeboat.” This described her husband perfectly. He lived in Paris since 1939, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse for six years until his first one-man show in 1950. He created large-scale abstract oil paintings with vivid blues and glowing puddles of orange and red. Painting and printmaking were Lebadang’s most frequently used media but he also worked in terra cotta and a variety of other media, such as “Vessel” (1994). Whatever he created, each piece spoke to the entangled roles of man and nature. In his 1981 “La Comédie Humaine,” he wrote: “In my work, I use the circle, the magic symbol of life, to enclose reliefs and landscapes. It symbolizes that nature is inseparable from man. Man finds sustenance and spiritual nourishment in every source.” And while the human form was not represented figuratively in his work until the late 1970s, he confirmed that man was always present.. His oil paintings of the ’60s are ambiguous at first glance, yet the faint outlines of boats, bridges, and horses gently float to the top. After his shift in style, bringing definition to his paintings, these dreams were made more lucid. Many of his figures become emotive and highly dramatic, this time with visible faces. . Mixing media, he painted aerial scenes of mountains and oceans where the viewer was stationed in the heavens. These paintings elaborated on man’s relationship to the natural world, continuously presented as a flurry of memories. Memories—objects that haunt the entire oeuvre of the artist—are a familiar subject to Lebadang. “Art, in all its forms, whether literature, philosophy, or the visual arts, expresses an attempt to understand the riddle of life and helps lessen the fear of death,” he wrote. His work is exhibited in many public and private collections, including the Cincinnati Museum of Art in Ohio, the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, the Rockefeller Collection in New York, the Foundation Museum in Kenya, the Lund University Museum in Sweden, the Loo Collection in Tokyo, and the Museum of Arts and Letters in France. Lebadang was honored with numerous awards and accolades during his career. He also designed an award for the International Institute of St. Louis. The Lebadang Award is presented biannually to an individual who has demonstrated extraordinary volunteer service. The award program was established by the institute in 1989 to recognize organizations and individuals who exemplify “Peace within you, your country, and the world.” “My artwork is often strange but simple,” Lebadang once said. “So everyone can hopefully feel happy and relaxed, and that’s why they like them.”