Uyen Tieu [pronounced wen tee-yoo] is an American artist born in Wichita, Kansas and raised in the bayous of the Deep South and in Silicon Valley. Uyen lives and works in her forever home, New York City.
Born to Vietnamese war refugees, Ivy League educated, a painter and a corporate executive, Uyen explores the juxtapositions and curiosities of being divided among different worlds. Her oil paintings combine a cubist and figurative approach, creating paintings by reducing elements to angular forms yet still tethering the painting to an observed object or figure.
Trained in the Bauhaus technique, her paintings are rooted in constructing 3D models and geometric color. Her “Hidden Objects” series plays on this approach by wrapping vessels and forms in crinkled paper, to construct and paint observed objects with geometric shapes and shadows. In her “Forms and Figures” series, she takes portraits of daily family life and fragments the figures and embeds them in colored blocks.
Uyen has a BA from Yale University where she studied with artist and educator Robert Reed and is a member at The Art Students League where she studied with renowned abstract artists Larry Poons and Charles Hinman.