About UOB and Art
UOB’s involvement in art started in the 1970s with its collection of paintings by Singapore artists. Today, the UOB Art Collection has more than 2,800 artworks, made up primarily of paintings from established and emerging Southeast Asian artists.
UOB plays an active role in communities across the region, most notably through its long-term commitment to art. As the leading patron of the arts in Asia, the Bank continues to make art accessible to a wider audience through a diverse range of visual art programmes, partnerships and community outreach across the region.
The Bank’s flagship art programme is the UOB Painting of the Year competition, which was started in 1982 to recognise Southeast Asian artists and to offer them the opportunity to showcase their works to the wider community. The competition was extended to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and in 2023, to Vietnam. It is now the longest running art competition in Singapore and one of the most prestigious in Southeast Asia.
Over the past 42 years, the competition has cultivated and advanced the careers of many artists in Singapore. Notable among them are Mr. Goh Beng Kwan (1982 winner), and the late Mr. Anthony Poon (1983 winner) and Mr. Chua Ek Kay (1991 winner), who received the Singapore Cultural Medallion, Singapore’s most distinguished art award.
The competition has also recognised talents from across the region through the UOB Southeast Asian POY award. Previous winners include Mr. Yong Wee Loon from Singapore in 2024, Ms. Pratchaya Charernsook from Thailand in 2023, Chomrawi Suksom from Thailand in 2022, Mr. Saiful Razman from Malaysia in 2021, Mr. Prabu Perdana from Indonesia in 2020, Mr. Anagard from Indonesia in 2019, Mr. Suvi Wahyudianto from Indonesia in 2018.
Together with the UOB POY winning artists, UOB also runs art workshops for underprivileged and special needs children regularly. At these workshops, the young learn art techniques from art professionals and award-winning artists.
In recognition of the Bank’s long-term commitment to art, UOB was presented with the Singapore National Arts Council’s Distinguished Patron of the Arts Award for the 23rd time in 2025.
About UOB Vietnam
UOB Vietnam commenced operations officially on 2 July 2018. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of UOB, a leading bank in Asia with a global network of around 500 offices in 19 countries and territories in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America.
UOB has been in Vietnam for 30 years, started from a representative office in 1993 and became the first Singapore bank to launch a branch in the country in 1995. Today, UOB Vietnam offers a range of personal and institutional financial services to both Vietnamese and overseas customers across the country backed by the seamless connectivity offered through UOB’s regional network. In 2019, UOB Vietnam expanded into northern Vietnam with a branch in Hanoi. With the completion of the acquisition of Citibank Vietnam’s consumer banking business early 2023, UOB now has a total five branches in Ho Chi Minh city and Hanoi.
For nearly nine decades, UOB has adopted a customer-centric approach to create long-term value by staying relevant through its enterprising spirit and doing right by its customers. UOB is focused on building the future of ASEAN – for the people and businesses within, and connecting with, ASEAN.
The Bank connects businesses to opportunities in the region with its unparalleled regional footprint and leverages data and insights to innovate and create personalised banking experiences and solutions catering to each customer’s unique needs and evolving preferences. UOB is also committed to help businesses forge a sustainable future, by fostering social inclusiveness, creating positive environmental impact and pursuing economic progress. UOB believes in being a responsible financial services provider and is steadfast in its support of art, social development of children and education, doing right by its communities and stakeholders.
For media queries, please contact:
Name: Vu Nguyen Hoang Yen
Strategic Communications and Brand
Email: vu.nguyenhoangyen@uobgroup.com
Tel: 077 694 6574
Name: Pham Tieu Giang
Strategic Communications and Brand
Email: pham.tieugiang@uobgroup.com
Tel: 0937 813 613
Appendix 1: Winning Artworks of the 2025 UOB POY in Vietnam
Established Artist Category
1. UOB Painting of the Year Award
Temporary Connection
Artist: Cao Van Thuc
This painting portrays urban labourers crowded together on the back of a truck. Their gestures of holding, clutching and clinging embody both mutual protection and a fragile solidarity in a foreign environment. Their bodies form a near-complete square at the centre, with one corner missing – a metaphor for the precariousness and incompleteness of their struggle for survival.
Executed in lacquer combined with acid-etching on aluminium, the work sets the rough textures of the figures against the polished sheen of the metal surface. Within the city, the reflective ground captures its surroundings, becoming an allegory for the gulf between the hardship of workers’ lives and the glittering façade of modern urbanity.
About the artist:
Cao Van Thuc (b. 1995) graduated from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2020. His practice is marked by a deep humanism and empathy for labourers. He seeks images that are simple yet emotionally resonant, like a quiet but enduring voice of everyday life. For him, painting is both self-reflection and a profound dialogue between his inner world and the external environment. It is also a journey of self-discovery, through which he recognises that the self is always in motion and in flux.
2. Gold Award
Reality and Reality 02
Artist: Vu Hoang
Drawing on the urban environment of his upbringing, the work presents a scene in which a massive billboard dominates the foreground, backed by a heap of scrap metal, with another billboard faintly visible in the distance. The composition starkly contrasts the glossy façade of consumer society with the ruins and waste hidden beneath its surface.
The work’s force lies in its striking visual oppositions. A vivid pink block radiates intensity, created through textured material layered over a polished ground, while the darker section is rendered in successive coats of oil paint in cold, sombre tones, producing depth and weight. Incorporating toy objects modelled in air-dry clay and painted over, Hoang constructs a metaphor for the intrusion of consumer culture’s detritus upon the city’s polished exterior.
About the artist:
Vu Hoang (b. 1989) graduated from the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in 2022. He received Second Prize at the 6th National Young Fine Arts Festival (2022). In his practice, Hoang often draws inspiration from urban life and the shifting dynamics of human relationships. By amplifying and reframing multiple layers of reality, he seeks a balance of energy and emotion within opposing forces, generating distinctive reflections in each of his works.
3. Silver Award
Four Couplets on the Mekong
Artist: Tran Quoc Giang
“Four couplets on the Mekong” is structured as four parallel vertical bands, evoking the image of calligraphic couplets ending with exclamation marks. Layers of flowing colour and overlapping scratches on the surface resemble both a topographic map and archaeological traces bearing the marks of time.
Four sections symbolise the cyclical stages of the river – birth, existence, decay, and dissolution – reflecting the impermanence that governs both nature and humanity. Using lacquer combined with engraving and mother-of-pearl inlay from the traditional craft village of Go Cong, the artist deliberately exposes underlying layers usually concealed, allowing “formation-existence” to coexist with “decay-extinction” within the very substance of the work. This visual logic resonates with the Mekong’s present condition: over-exploited by hydropower, its ecosystem has suffered severe damage. Once a vital source of fish and aquatic life, the river is now increasingly depleted, its downstream waters threatened by salinisation.
About the artist:
Tran Quoc Giang (b. 1989) graduated from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 2015. Born and raised in Go Cong, Tien Giang, his childhood by the riverbank made nature an enduring theme in his practice, while opening broader reflections on the human condition and society. His works reveal a parallel between creation and destruction, presence and loss, serving both as a metaphor for the impermanence of all things and as a mirror of today’s ecological challenges.
4. Bronze Award
Memories of the Earth
Artist: Ngo Thanh Hung
The work contemplates the complex relationship between humanity and nature in Vietnam, where the land bears not only deep cultural and historical memory but also effects from war and industrialisation. Inspired by the arid landscapes of Central Vietnam, regions battered annually by storms and floods, the artist uses rusted corrugated iron as a principal material. Combined with the refined beauty of lacquer, these elements become symbols of the tension between the earth’s resilience and its fragility under human impact.
Employing a mixed-media approach, Hung begins with a shimmering layer of lacquer to represent life, onto which he affixes scraps of old metal sheets and electronic circuits, evoking traces of industrial intrusion. He then covers the surface with natural clay and mud to obscure the past, before sanding it back to reveal the lacquer beneath, suggesting both destruction and rebirth. Finally, the work is left outdoors under the rain, allowing nature itself to cleanse it, as if enacting a journey of purification and healing. Each layer of material is conceived as a stratum of memory: from geological time, through industrial present, towards a future of renewal. At the same time, it stands as a call to respect and protect nature.
About the artist:
Ngo Thanh Hung (b. 1982) is currently a lecturer at the University of Architecture in Da Nang. He works with traditional materials, particularly lacquer, experimenting with methods that probe memory and cultural identity. Through the language of abstraction, Hung allows emotions to ascend and settle within successive layers of grinding and inlay – a laborious, incremental process of refinement.
Emerging Artist Category
1. Most Promising Artist of the Year Award
Self-portrait, 2025 (a life rooted in my form as a tree)
Artist: Nguyen Ngoc Thuan
“Self-portrait” is Nguyen Ngoc Thuan’s first painting, created at the age of fifty-three. It was inspired by a chest X-ray and the implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) that has sustained his body for the past decade. Rooted within him like a “mother tree,” the device is poised to jolt his heart back to life whenever it falters, provoking a troubling question: how might the “original” human be defined in the future?
On burlap, Thuan employs acrylic to expose the body’s fragility, confronting the hidden self and initiating a dialogue with the figure concealed within the chest of the painting. Beyond autobiography, the work raises wider questions about what it means to be human in an age when medical technologies increasingly prolong life. For Thuan, the ICD device becomes a cultural relic — one he hopes might one day be displayed in a museum as testimony to both human suffering and human evolution.
About the artist:
Nguyen Ngoc Thuan (b. 1972) was born in Binh Thuan. He graduated from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts before joining Tuoi Tre newspaper, where literature became his defining path. He has since established himself as a prominent voice in contemporary Vietnamese prose and is a member of the Vietnam Writers’ Association. His notable works include “Open the Window, Eyes Closed” and “Fundamentally Sad”. With the UOB Painting of the Year, Thuan expands his creative journey into painting for the first time, continuing his artistic spirit and engaging with existential questions.
2. Gold Award
Liminal State
Artist: Tran Viet Long
Originating from the idea of thermal imaging (thermography), the artist sought to translate a scientific method of recording into the medium of lacquer. The work employs vivid, high-contrast colours as signals that extend beyond ordinary perception, while also serving as an experiment to expand the chromatic possibilities of traditional lacquer techniques.
As the painted layers are ground back, unexpected patterns emerge, evoking the structure of malachite – a mineral that, as the artist suggests, carries within it strata of memory and intrinsic meaning. The work thus becomes a dialogue between artist and material, where the inherent unpredictability of lacquer is elevated into a creative force. The artist assumes the role of a guide, allowing material and ideas to meet, and together determine the natural point at which the work comes to rest.
About the artist:
Tran Viet Long (b. 1992) graduated in Lacquer Painting from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts in 2016. His practice, combining traditional Vietnamese lacquer techniques with contemporary experimentation, begins with details often overlooked in everyday life. Long embraces the inherent unpredictability of the medium as part of the creative process, while exploring new possibilities of colour blending in lacquer to extend its expressive range from tradition to modernity. His works open a dialogue between material, perception, and reflections on existence.
3. Silver Award
Seed
Artist: Le Tan Chung
The surface of “Seed” unfolds like a cooled lava field: a dense expanse of slag, blackened yet shimmering with orange-red glints, as if a fire had only just died out. The work originates from the artist’s observation of nature’s cycles of renewal. Materials such as slag, rice husk ash, and mother-of-pearl create a raw, primal texture that evokes the fierce vitality of nature rising from ashes.
This imagery recalls the artist’s childhood in a blacksmith’s family. On long rainy days in Central Viet Nam, he would often see, behind the blazing forge, a bed of grey cinder from which proud young tamarind shoots pushed through the charred remains. The memory of that resilient green life left an enduring imprint on him. Years later, standing before the Thoi Loi volcano, where million-year-old sediment nourishes fertile garlic fields, he recognised a paradox both harsh and beautiful: the very fire that incinerates all things is also the source of life. The work is Chung’s tribute to Central Viet Nam — a land that taught him resilience and the strength of hope.
About the artist:
Le Tan Chung (b. 1997) is an artist working at the intersection of visual art, architecture and landscape. His practice engages with geological memory and the enduring vitality of nature, while also exploring the relationship between humans and their environment. Alongside his personal projects, Chung has participated in site-specific, memory-based projects in Vietnam.
4. Bronze Award
Café Corner
Artist: Tran Van Hieu
“Café corner” captures an everyday moment inside a coffee shop styled after the subsidised-era aesthetic: soft yellow light, worn wooden chairs and tables, a scene heavy with memory. Using an overlapping oil technique with continuous brushwork, the artist creates the impression of a space in motion. Layers of paint alternate between thick and thin, warm and cool, light and dark, bringing out depth and atmosphere that feel both intimate and nostalgic.
Familiar objects such as a metal kettle, wooden table, lamp, and wall corner are simplified into planes and rhythms of color, yet their structures remain clear. Within this pared-down approach, the space is at once still and alive, evoking an interplay of reality and illusion. The work preserves small fragments of daily life: a familiar cafe corner, a fleeting emotion, or a quiet sense of peace amid the pulse of ordinary living.
About the artist:
Tran Van Hieu (b. 2001) graduated in Oil Painting from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts. His practice is influenced by Expressionism and Impressionism, while drawing inspiration from music and everyday memory. Hieu focuses on conveying emotion through colour and the rhythm of the brushstroke. From portraits and still lifes to landscapes and familiar street corners, his paintings open up spaces that feel both intimate and nostalgic – preserving fleeting moments within the pulse of daily life.
