(In the Landscape)

Hoi

In the 1970s Hoi (an alias for the artist Le Ba Dang, which he signed “Lebadang”) was struggling to find the balance between his life in Paris and the country he had left behind nearly three decades earlier - Vietnam. As his homeland suffered the devastation of war, Hoi’s work began to reflect the reminiscences of his childhood, with compositions that dwelled in the colors, flora, and people of his village. This work, with figures standing in a distant landscape, surrounded by the effervescent plumes of memory-induced color and movement, pays homage to a life he had always suspected he would return to, but now realized was forever changed. Hoi would, in fact, return to Vietnam for the first time in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. He would help to restore his village and would donate the proceeds of several war-themed works to the Vietnamese government to help in recovery efforts. He would continue to visit and to create artworks honoring his homeland until his death in 2015.