Ha Minh Thuan is a young painter born in Dak Mil (Dak Nong Province), raised in Da Lat, and currently based in Ho Chi Minh City. Taking nature as the point of departure for his artistic practice, Thuan does not seek to depict the landscape itself. Instead, through the materiality of painting, he employs both the physical presence of his medium and the construction of textured surfaces as a space for expressing memory and emotions that resist articulation.

The “Cortex” series (2026) marks a significant development in Ha Minh Thuan's practice. He establishes a distinctive visual language through an intricate system of raised textures created with palette knives and successive layers of acrylic paint. Drawing inspiration from the structure of tree bark while invoking the cerebral cortex as a metaphor for the layers of memory, perception, and emotion accumulated over time, the series situates nature at the threshold between representation and abstraction. In “Cortex”, the pictorial surface shifts with the viewer's changing perspective, opening a space in which memory, materiality, and emotion continually settle, erode, and regenerate.