French-Vietnamese artist Bao Vuong paints what the sea seeks to retain.

His canvases bear the scars of journeys both personal and collective, of bodies and souls battered by the ocean.

His gestures come from a deep and distant night—one of fear and flight, etched into the flesh of exiles and survivors; the night that saw the child uprooted from his native land.

Each wave, each reflection, whispers the names erased by the wind; and his canvases breathe life into the memory, recounting it.

The sea evoked is one of shipwrecks and loss, but also one of promises of a brighter tomorrow.

This horizon line, which seems unattainable, sometimes even invisible, can be crossed by the living—by those who can tell the story.

The blackness of Bao Vuong's canvases is not that of nothingness, but that of beginning. From this matter springs light.

Here, shadow and light are not opposed: they extend each other.

Like Yin and Yang, they contain each other, nourish each other, and balance each other in the same breath.

Between the two, an infinity of nuances is invented, as between two points in the world an infinity of possible existences unfolds between two points in the world.

In his paintings, the artist does not seek to represent, but to reveal: beauty on the edge of fear, life that is fragile yet tenacious, the perseverance of the waves in their desire to reach the shore, and that of the foam that resists the last breaths of the tides.

His work tells of what connects beings despite distance, of what persists even when everything seems to be falling apart.

More than an image, The Crossing is a meditation where light meets darkness, and where Bao Vuong seeks the essence of the world: infinity.

(Text by Bao Vuong Studio)