In his primary school years Vũ Dân Tân studied drawing under the guidance of the renowned Hanoi painter and educator Ngô Mạnh Quỳnh (1917 – 1991).

Vũ Dân Tân was unable to receive formal art training, but the creative and intellectual environment in his family during his early years has shaped his future endeavors and influenced his artistic work.

In 1981, he set up a personal art studio that served as a gathering place for the intellectual community in Hanoi and foreshadowed the creation of the Salon Natasha.

Throughout these decades, he developed original expressive idioms, with an increasing focus on three-dimensional pieces, often produced from found organic materials and everyday objects.

Vũ Dân Tân’s wide-ranging art practice covers such domains as mask-making, drawing, painting, printmaking, art-objects, sculpture and installations.

[10] The Basket Masks series, borrowing familiar iconographic elements “transforms and reinterprets these to propose new, open narratives unknown in traditional culture”, writes art historian Iola Lenzi, who additionally sees in them a performative ethos.

[14] During his second visit to Russia in 1993-1994, Vũ produced the painting series on Soviet political posters: one featured clerical imagery that alluded to contradictions between required religious humility and brutal historical reality, while another demonstrated the artist’s interpretation of communist slogans.

In the middle 1990s, in his two-dimensional works on varied themes, Vũ employed unusual forms of support - newspapers, journal pages, and calendars, often incorporating his own textual statements.

The idea of pilgrimage is linked to both artist’s real life and fictitious journeys, “as well as to dreams of liberating from geographical, racial, national or political constraints”.

), The substitution of official figures representing state power by personas belonging to the global cultural pantheon on the artist’s banknotes “indirectly subverts the nation’s monolithic discourse of history and authority.”[17] Moreover, with its potential for circulation “Intellectually elegant, medium-savvy, aesthetically accessible, and subtly critical, Vu Dan Tan’s money series embodies Southeast Asia contemporary practice at its most accomplished”.

Prof. Ian Howard, who was curator of Vietnamese art for the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial and selected Vũ’s Suitcases of a Pilgrim for exhibiting, wrote that these pieces “ambiguously – that is, either intuitively or deliberately – proclaim an irrational response to the coercive nature and intent of institutional life.”[21] Series Fashion, which arose at the turn of the millennium and developed until the artist’s death, represents human-scale costumes-like objects-sculptures “made out of recuperated cardboard and carefully folded, cut, manipulated, perforated, painted” to reference women.

Shiny and stiffly armor-like evoking protection, exclusion, and violence even more pointedly than the paper suits, the metal costume-armors are more visually strident and less tactile than their cardboard counterparts, closer to classical sculpture in their solemnity and solidity.”[24] A significant three-dimensional work Cadillac–Icarus was created by Vũ Dân Tân in 1999 during his art residency at the Pacific Bridge Gallery, Oakland, CA.

Vũ Dân Tân’s performative Cadillac–Icarus, in its supposed drive through Hanoi streets, operated as a reference to freedom and prosperity, while obliquely questioning the status quo.

[26] The work is also interpreted as scrutinizing “the critical intersection of history and globalization in turn-of-the-millennium Hanoi.”[27] According to Lenzi “By infiltrating public streets Cadillac/Icarus brought complex ideas and contradictions to all, embodying the accessible critical language of contemporary art.”[28] The closing event of this project was a greeting of Cadillac- Icarus at his final destination, which turned into a one day long improvised performance with the artist Đào Anh Khánh acting as Icarus and a group of Vietnamese visual artists playing music on traditional instruments and loose car parts.