The painting of ‘The gate of Hue Imperial City’ by Nguyen Do Cung is unlike any other city gate in the imagination of the Vietnamese people. Not polished, ostentatious, meticulously decorated; no noisy closing doors and keys, no horizontal rows along the winding path leading the way…
‘The gate of Hue Imperial City’ that Nguyen Do Cung represented is only a long horizontal line, a wall with time; a watchtower jutted out barely; a deserted red dirt road, only a lonely figure in the middle of the world. The rows of trees are “framed” in a cubist shape, as if recalling a cubism from Nguyen Do Cung’s thought when standing in front of a royal city. All is quiet, lonely, sad. If the cubism is strong, muscular and monolithic, then with the shape of ‘The gate of Hue Imperial City’ it’s just Nguyen Do Cung’s touch on this tendency.
In addition, we also find a cubist thinking of Nguyen Do Cung in the work ‘Village Gate’ painted before he came to Hue in 1940. At that time, Western modern art trends had not yet entered Vietnam strongly. Nguyen Do Cung could be a pioneer.
