Cuong Nguyen’s ability to highlight the beauty in the world around him is something that informs his art as well as his perspective. One might say that he represents the opposite of the tortured artist cliché: despite the fact that his formative years in Vietnam were characterized by significant hardship, his sometimes romantic and sometimes mysterious portraits and still life paintings reflect his positive outlook and determination to persevere.

Today, Cuong works in both oil paints and pastels, though casual viewers may at first have trouble distinguishing the two media in Cuong’s hands. Though he almost never blends his strokes, Cuong achieves a level of detail and smoothness of gradations that is unusual in pastel paintings. In oils, he aims for a realism that never crosses the line to photographic, so that the viewer always has a sense for how the image was formed from its raw materials . Regardless of media, however, Cuong Nguyen’s paintings always reveal a fundamentally optimistic view of the world and a sense of wonder towards the beauty that surrounds us.