“Being used to live in the countryside during my childhood, the memories of the countryside had imprinted in my mind and I wished to express the purest and clearest part of my feelings of the countryside life as well as the landscape.” – Ha Tri Hieu Ha Tri Hieu’s poetic style of expressionistic paintings often feature stylised figures with featureless faces and yawning mouths. Illustrated here is at group of five figures, the village singers, performing a choral act of silent harmonies. Ha Tri Hieu graduated from the Vietnam University of Fine Art in 1983, where he studied pottery and lacquer. He is a member of the ‘Gang of Five’ alongside contemporary artists Hong Viet Dung, Dang Xuan Hoa, Tran Luong and Pham Quang Vinh. The collective of Hanoi painters rose to prominence in the early 1990s in Vietnam. In 2018, curator Le Thuan Uyen presented an exhibition titled Gang Of Five Chancing Modern held at the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre (Ho Chi Minh City) in collaboration with Art Vietnam (Hanoi).