Wildlife art

Đào Văn Hoàng

Saigon, 1962 — chalk on a concrete floor, a childhood at the zoo, and now four decades of painting the animals of the tropics.

Đào Văn Hoàng was born in Saigon in 1962. He first drew with chalk on his mother's concrete floor at about two years old, and found wildlife on trips with her to the Saigon Zoo — coming home to make his own picture books from animals cut out of magazines.

In 1979, four years after the war ended, he left Vietnam by boat as a refugee. He reached France in 1980, studied computing, and worked in Paris for sixteen years before returning to Vietnam in 1996. There he joined an advertising agency as an art director, and went on to be creative director at several agencies for more than fifteen years.

In 2013 he left advertising to paint wildlife full time. Since then he has made illustrations, commissioned murals and concept designs for interpretation centres, national parks and public spaces across Vietnam, and works to teach children there about nature through his art.

He is drawn to the tropics — Africa, Central and South America — and having visited more than twenty-five countries, still travels to watch wildlife. He paints in acrylic on canvas, in a detailed, realistic manner: animals in their typical poses and behaviour, in their own habitats.