About
HAI HOANG (b. 2003, Vietnam) is a painter based in London and Hanoi. Hai is a 2025 First Class graduate of Kingston School of Art, where he was nominated for the Freelands Painting Prize. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the UK and Vietnam.
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ARTIST STATEMENT:
My body of work presents imagined spaces. Through that, I explore our relationship with space, specifically the feelings we have when we encounter those spaces. Space correlates closely with memories and experiences, even though it is somewhere unknown or even nonexistent. I am interested in how nostalgia and melancholy are evoked through spaces that do not exist, that have no emotional attachments to anyone. I depict anonymous, youthful figures in solitude, facing vast fictional spaces composed of fragmented architecture, culture, and memory. Trees, wires, lakes, and blurry figures recur as motifs across my paintings to explore the accumulated histories and memories of seemingly banal places. The compositions create liminal, in-between spaces to explore cultural memories that feel familiar yet uncanny.
I work with oil paints in large scales, pushing the line between painterly techniques and graphic clarity, an interplay between softness and structure, between abstraction and figuration. Through it, I explore the movement of seemingly solid, motionless spaces.