Artist Ca Le Thang was born in 1949 in Ben Tre. At the age of 6, he moved to the North with his family. He later graduated from the Hanoi University of Fine Arts and went on to teach there, as well as at Ho Chi Minh University of Fine Arts. In addition, he served as chairman of the Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts Association during the 1990s.
Ca Le Thang’s painting carries a consistent and self-contained visual identity. He treats place as a guiding concept that opens a network of relations between people, memory, and landscape, while expanding the pictorial field through a semi-abstract language. Throughout his practice, he remained steadfast with “The floating season,” returning to it over many years as a site of continual excavation.
From this, his works emerge as a vast Mekong chronicle, where thin, thick, dense, and porous layers interlace to convey the artist’s deep longing before the beauty of the riverine terrain and its shifting weather. He unfolds a continuous narrative through warm, earthen palettes reminiscent of alluvial sediment where the Mekong Delta culture is evoked through green stretches of remembrance, late-afternoon rains, and the recurring reverberations of a sensitive mind. It is this fidelity to a personal geography of memory that has secured Ca Le Thang’s distinct signature: a storyteller with the colors of earth, water, and the subtle movements of lived experience.