ABOUT

Born Vietnamese in Paris in 1975, Mai Khanh and her family became political refugees when the communists came to power in Vietnam.She was barely six months old when they left the Metropolis for New Caledonia on a boat.Mai Khanh learned about drawing and painting at Atelier Le Nain in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. She followed the teaching of the painter Milaine Lung who passed on her knowledge of painting techniques acquired from Nicolas Wacker at the École Supérieure Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris.After a rich apprenticeship on figurative subjects - still lifes, living models, landscapes, Mai Khanh turns towards abstraction and large formats. From 2003 to 2004, she joined the Hypermedia-Multimedia Masters at the École Nationale Supérieures des Beaux Arts de Paris (Ensba).After Paris, she moved to New York and joined the free workshops of the Art Student League (ASL) where she followed classes for a year and a half by Frank O'Cain (Painting, Design, Color, Composition) and Kikuo Saito (Color and Drawing).

Mai Khanh currently lives and works in Roubaix. She is a member of the artist collective (IN)Visible founded by Marion Peylet as well as alumni of the Cercle de l'art, founded by Margaux Déry.

“ My painting is rooted in landscape painting. Sometimes we can recognize the sea, sometimes the mountain, sometimes neither the sea nor the mountain. Nevertheless, there is an imagination, a topography which links it to the landscape, to the imagined landscape, to the interior landscape. I seek to create this poetics of space dear to Gaston Bachelard, an immersive experience through the format and at the same time deeply human and intimate. From compositions drawn from natural landscapes of seas, rocks, rivers, bark, I construct large abstract paintings like moving and meditative journeys. Those who contemplate are invited to lose themselves in the space of the canvas where the details form so many landscapes within the landscape.It is in large spaces that, for me, my compositions unfold with the most force, that they take on enough substance to cause loss in the immensity. In this contemplation that Gaston Bachelard so beautifully calls intimate immensity”

Mai Khanh Pham To