Tomas Vu is an American artist whose primary media are painting, printmaking, and installation art.
The works depict Vu's recollection of the Tet Offensive, a terrifying but sublime sky illuminated from napalm explosions.
In another work, Killing Field (2002), Vu created 125 skulls cast in wax and laid them in a gallery space so that they appeared to be emerging from the floor.
Vu's first body of work to break through to a psychedelic, fantastic, and at times dystopic world is an installation, Opium Dreams, first created for a solo show at the Museum Haus Kasuya in Yokohama, Japan.
These paintings and works on paper consist of dense passages of line that create complex network structures and spatial relationships.
Layers of silkscreen, paint, drawing and collage recall stratums of atmosphere, landscape, memory and time.
The work draws upon Hieronymus Bosch's apocalyptic vision of The Garden of Earthly Delights as well as postmodern and poststructuralist ideas.
Vu's most recent bodies of work reference artificial intelligence, and draw from sources such as the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth, and concepts like the Uncanny Valley hypothesis, and the Frankenstein complex.
In his Brooklyn Rail review of Vu's solo show at Von Lintel Gallery in New York, Gandalf Gavan proposes that Vu's works references Michel Foucault's concepts of order and disorder, of an 'incongruous space,' a place where traditional knowledge, as established through the process of identification, is replaced by a state of simultaneity and non-definition.
(Gavan 2006) Elisa Decker writes in her Art in America review, each picture possesses its own disquieting beauty and is a world unto itself that one penetrates only slowly.