Điềm Phùng Thị (1920–2002) primarily is known as a sculptor; however, her prolific oeuvre includes prints, paintings, fabric collages, jewellery and furniture. She worked with terracotta, plaster, stone, wood, concrete, metal, brick and lacquer. Her primordial and abstract figures belie her interest in the body, especially the woman’s body, as an elemental form. She apprenticed in the sculpture workshop of Antoniucci Volti (1915–1989) at the École des Arts appliqués de Paris in 1961. She would go on to develop an alphabet of modular shapes that she assembled into a seemingly infinite variety of compositions. Her personal library contains numerous books on yoga, massage, physical therapy and herbal medicine – and we can infer that they informed her understanding of the body. Another significant influence is Vietnamese material culture and architecture, especially the jointed bracket structure commonly found in pagodas and that likely inspired her creation of the modules.

Điềm Phùng Thị was born in Huế, the last dynastic capital of Vietnam. After her mother died in 1923, her father remarried and moved to the Central Highlands for his mandarin post from 1926 to 1932. Điềm Phùng Thị graduated in dentistry from the University of Hanoi in 1946, and subsequently joined the Việt Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam) in the Anti-French War of Resistance. The mandarin and the soldier – one representing the dynastic and the other the revolutionary – would be recurring figures in her oeuvre.

Due to a serious illness, Điềm Phùng Thị left in 1948 for treatment in France. She retrained in dentistry and, in 1953, married a childhood friend and dental surgeon named Điềm Bửu; they settled in Paris. She visited the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s, and kept abreast of the artistic transition from the École des Beaux-arts de l’Indochine era to Vietnamese Socialist Realism. In the 1990s, she moved back to Huế with her ailing husband and worked with city officials to set up a museum for her oeuvre, which opened in1994.

Điềm Phùng Thị came to art-making in 1959, learning pottery as a leisure activity. Two years later, she enrolled in Volti’s workshop. She first showed in the Salon des indépendants in Paris in 1961, and had her first solo exhibition in 1966 at Galerie des Jeunes. In the same year, she met Raymond Cogniat, an art critic for Figaro, and the founder of the Paris Biennale. Điềm Phùng Thị participated in the First International Exhibition of Fine Arts of Saigon in 1962, the Third Biennale de Cachan in 1970, the Fourth Biennale de Ravenne in 1972 and the Biennale de Carrare in 1973, amongst numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Europe and a handful in Vietnam. She made 37 monumental sculptures in France for schools, parks, companies, public buildings and the Vietnamese Embassy. Her last monument was a tomb for her husband, which was constructed in Huế in 1997.