Tomas Vu was born in Saigon, Vietnam in 1963 and at the age of ten moved with his family to El Paso, Texas. Vu received a BFA from the University of Texas, El Paso in 1987 and went on to earn an MFA from Yale University in 1990. He currently lives in New York City. Vu has exhibited internationally and has had solo museum shows in Japan, Italy and a forthcoming show at P.S. 1 Center for Contemporary Art, NYC. He has received numerous awards including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Award and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Vu is currently faculty at the School of the Arts, Columbia University. He holds the LeRoy Neiman Professorship in Visual Arts and also currently serves as the Artistic Director of the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. In his work, Vu's primary media are painting, printmaking and installation art. A powerful source for his imagery comes from his personal memories of growing up in Vietnam during the war. Vu creates ephemeral landscapes describing spaces where lines between imagination and memory become obscured.
At the Neiman Center, from 2008-2009, Tomas Vu has produced a serial body of work entitled Flatland. With layers of silkscreen and laser engraved images burned into wood veneer, Vu uses the media of collage and screening to build fantastical scenes depicting cycles of destruction, decay and rebirth. The imagery extends the dialogue of nature's capacity for both violence and compassion. Flatland as a series is formed into groups of ten unique prints in each portfolio.
