The exhibitions
Forty years of painting the animals of South-East Asia and beyond, arranged the way Đào Văn Hoàng has always shown them — as exhibitions, each a deliberate series. Scroll to walk past them; step into any one.
Prototype
Hornbills of the World
A survey of the family, genus by genus
Fifteen hornbills, most painted at the scale of a portrait rather than a field guide — the casque, the eye, the slow working of preen-oil into feather.
New Hope
Vietnam's rare and rediscovered mammals
Critically endangered and hard-to-see animals of South-East Asia — several set beside a Rafflesia, the largest flower on earth and a parasite that smells of carrion. Things most people will only ever meet as paint.
The World's 25 Most Endangered Primates
From the IUCN biennial list
Species from the IUCN Primate Specialist Group's list of the twenty-five most endangered primates, each set as a single figure against a near-empty ground — a deliberate act of painting the edge of disappearance.
Vietnam Primates in Art
Doucs, langurs, gibbons and lorises of the Annamites
A long project on the primates of Vietnam — most of them endemic, most of them endangered — painted in their forest rather than against blank ground: limestone karst, flame-tree flower, monsoon rain.
Thinkers
Primate portraits
Portraits that hold on the face and the pause — apes and monkeys caught in the act of looking, waiting, considering. Shown at the American Society of Primatologists meeting, where the series was given a special recognition award.
Primates — Intimate Life
The private hours — grooming, resting, watching
Primates seen the way a long, patient sit reveals them rather than the way a lens catches them: lemurs of Madagascar, orangutan and proboscis of Borneo, snub-nosed monkeys in snow, doucs in the flame trees.
Cats of South-East Asia
The small and clouded cats of the forest
Animals the camera traps catch only as a blur, a tail, a night-shine of eyes.
Giant Fishes of the Mekong
The great migratory fish of a dammed river
Painted from below, in the tea-coloured light beneath a sunken tree — the only place most people will ever meet them now. The last plate is the finished mural.
Birds of U Minh Thượng
Watercolour studies from a Mekong peat-swamp forest
One of the last peat-swamp forests in the Mekong delta, painted bird by bird from the reed line — munias, sparrows, sunbirds, wagtails, weavers.
New World Primates
Studies of the monkeys of Central and South America
Reference studies, most on bare white ground, each animal turned to show the detail that separates it from its neighbours — titis, sakis, uakaris, capuchins, squirrel and night monkeys.
Colombia's Treasure
Birds and mammals of the Andes and Amazon
Colombia holds more bird species than any other country. A set of its endemics and near-endemics, with a few of the mammals that share the cloud forest and the páramo.
Botanic Art
Watercolours, root to seed
Botanical watercolours in the classical manner — the whole plant where it fits the page, root, leaf, flower and fruit, with the Latin name and the collecting date lettered in the corner. Many are coastal and mangrove species; several were painted at Kirstenbosch in Cape Town.
New Works
Recent paintings
A small group of the most recent paintings, not yet part of a named exhibition.
Field Diaries
The books that come before the paintings
Watercolour, dip pen, a species list running down the margin in three languages — mangrove leaves used against snakebite, the blue of a fiddler crab's carapace, hawkmoths caught on a tennis court at night. Spreads from southern Africa, the Cape, and the Mekong.
Compose your own
Pick any combination of tags — creature, place, kind of work — and generate an exhibition that doesn't exist yet, shown exactly the same way.