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Wildlife painter · Ho Chi Minh City · in the field since 1999

Đào Văn Hoàng

I was born in Saigon in 1962. At two I was already drawing animals in chalk in front of the house. My mother took me to Thảo Cầm Viên zoo, and in the evening I would copy from memory the creatures I had seen.

In 1979 I left Vietnam by sea. France took me in, and I lived there seventeen years, teaching myself to paint while I worked in technical drawing and graphic design. I returned to Saigon in 1996 as a creative director in advertising, for Biti's, Dutch Lady and Prudential. In 2014 I stopped everything to do one thing only: paint the living world.

I do not paint only for art. I paint so that these animals are known, loved and protected. If one day a machine paints more seductive pictures than mine, it will not be able to put into them what I lived through, face to face with the animal.

Since then I have painted murals for Cát Tiên, Tràm Chim and Bidoup Núi Bà, an underwater world across the waiting area and consultation rooms of the Hospital of Tropical Diseases, exhibitions for rescue centres, and plates for the WWF, Free The Bears, Wildlife At Risk, Save Vietnam's Wildlife and Re:wild. I paint the species of Southeast Asia, and above all the endangered ones that conservation campaigns rarely mention. My notebooks come from twenty-five countries. In 2019, with my wife Lê Quỳnh Huệ, we founded Le Petit Musée to pass all of this on to children.

I studied the proportions of each species very carefully, their behaviour and their habitat, with conservation scientists.

  1. 1962Born in Saigon
  2. 1979Leaves Vietnam by sea, then seventeen years in France
  3. 1996Returns to Saigon, creative director in advertising
  4. 1999First mural: 200 m² at Cát Tiên National Park
  5. 2014Shows 22 primate paintings at the primatology congress in Hanoi, and leaves advertising to paint full time
  6. 2014-19Exhibits at primatology congresses: Hanoi, Oregon, Rome, Washington, Thailand
  7. 2019Founds Le Petit Musée with Lê Quỳnh Huệ
  8. 2025First solo exhibition, Wildlife Art: The Natural World through an artist's eyes. Hội Mỹ thuật TP.HCM, 13 to 19 July

In the field

Taking notes in the bush, where every painting begins. From a report by THDT2, Đồng Tháp television.

In his own words

Every painting carries the note he wrote the day he saw the animal. These three come from the catalogue, unedited.

Ancient times
The challenge of painting wildlife doesn’t always come from living species, sometimes it’s about imagining those long extinct. Only a skull and a few bone fragments have been found of Archaeoindris. The rest is left, almost entirely, to imagination, though I rely on some scientific hypotheses. It was likely the size of a gorilla, but whether it lived on the ground or in trees remains uncertain.
Ancient times Extinct Sloth lemur
Splash
I used watercolor to echo the splash, to capture the exact moment this bird hits the surface, talons out, like a feathered explosion. Once rare in Europe, I was glad to find them fairly common in Vietnam, especially around Crocodile Lake in Cát Tiên National Park.
Splash Osprey
Squabbling
I’ve never seen them myself, but Rob Timmins, who discovered the species, gave me a clear picture of their habitat. I imagined them in that remote, rocky landscape, squabbling loudly before sunrise. In places like that, early morning bird chatter can be deafening, and you can’t help but wonder what they’re all saying.
Squabbling Bare-faced Bulbul

The animals he has painted

61 species

Field notes, one letter a month

Where I went, what I saw, what is on the easel. Nothing else, and one click to unsubscribe.

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