Lebadang

Lebadang was born in 1921 in Bich-La-Dong, a village along the Huong River in Quang-Tri Province of Hue, Vietnam. He moved to Paris in 1939 and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse for six years before his first one-man show in 1950. A versatile artist represented by Park West Gallery, he expressed himself through painting, watercolor, sculpture, jewelry, and graphic works, often combining various media to create sculptural, highly textured artwork.
His creative journey spanned decades of evolving styles. In the 1960s, he created large-scale abstract oil paintings with vivid blues and glowing puddles of orange and red, where faint outlines of boats, bridges, and horses gently emerged. By the late 1970s, human forms appeared more definitively in his work, becoming emotive and highly dramatic with visible faces. His cast paper reliefs from the 1980s featured handmade paper as ornate frames surrounding the paint, while his 1990s works presented aerial scenes of mountains and oceans with topographical textures.
After dozens of successful exhibitions, Lebadang sent money back to Vietnam to rebuild his devastated village. The Vietnamese government honored him with a sponsored Lebadang foundation and museum, the first arts foundation in Vietnam. His work is exhibited in collections including the Cincinnati Museum of Art, Phoenix Art Museum, Rockefeller Collection, and Museum of Arts and Letters in France.