Beyond beauty lies what is human.
In essence and in being, Diem Phung Thi’s life and work are permeated by this principle.
“For the first time, a sculptor—from among the many who journeyed from the Far East to Paris—secured a place for Asian art within the very heart of Parisian sculpture,” wrote Mady Ménier. Diem Phung Thi (born Phung Thi Cuc, 1920–2002) is a significant figure in twentieth-century sculpture, whose legacy was recognized in Larousse Dictionary: Twentieth-Century Art. She was an Associate Member of the European Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters.
Trained initially in dentistry in France, Diem’s path toward sculpture began as a means of respite through ceramics. A turn of fate led her to Volti—an artist who, after spending seven years in war, returned to find his studio bombed, his entire body of work destroyed. Diem began her artistic career alongside someone rebuilding from absolute ruin. A rigorous simplification of form, intertwined with a refined sensitivity to bodily presence, would become the sculptural language she pursued throughout her life.
It has been suggested that Diem Phung Thi only fully developed her artistic philosophy with the completion of the seven “modules”—flexible, scalable forms that could be expressed in various materials. Yet it is her early works that most clearly reveal what is human at the heart of her practice, articulated through two recurring subjects: war and women. In the formative decades of the 1960s and 1970s, as violence ravaged her homeland of Vietnam, Diem engaged the brutality of war alongside sustained explorations of the female body—its presence, gestures, and actions. Works from this period demonstrate how sculpture can bear the weight of historical violence through softness, flexibility, and bodily tenderness, without yielding to heroic monumentality or the romanticization of suffering.
My House in Wartime exists in two versions: bronze with fragments of B-52 aircraft, and broken brick. Materials that once enabled and later destroyed warfare are reassembled by Diem into the form of a house. Constructed entirely from scrap—makeshift and deformed—the structure offers little more than the suggestion of shelter rather than a home. The sole element that remains intact is the human figure, newly cast in bronze. The work poses a fundamental question: what can be reconstructed from war and its remnants? At the same time, it evokes life in Vietnam during the 1960s—a nation enduring amid devastation—and insists that beyond pain and destruction, it is the human essence that persists.
The One Who Did Not Return is a sculpture composed of plaster intertwined with fiber on a wooden support. The bodies it depicts are eroded to the point of near skeletal remains, moving toward total disintegration. Some figures are incomplete, bent and contorted as if under the strain of pain. In forming the human body, plaster simultaneously produces a rough, uneven surface—scarred, scraped, and gouged, as though violently worked over. Here, the human figure does not assume the posture of heroic sacrifice; instead, it dissolves alongside the violence of war itself. These fragmented forms register Diem Phung Thi’s own sense of anguish, echoing the catastrophic events unfolding in her homeland. The frayed fibers and the coarse texture of plaster evoke the losses left in war’s wake. Do these voids—like wounds continually carved deeper—stand as irreparable scars, or do they remain spaces awaiting repair?
With Liberation Soldier (1973), Diem Phung Thi redefined the language of the monument. By assembling fragments of downed B-52 aircraft, she rejected allegory and refused veneration through conventional means, substituting raw, discarded materials for the noble substances traditionally associated with commemoration. The remnants of American aircraft—shot down, salvaged, and stacked in a state of urgent precarity—reveal a striking proposition: violence is inscribed in the debris of its own instruments. Depicting a mother carrying the warrior of the Vietnamese people as they confront a vastly superior enemy force, Liberation Soldier stands not for a single figure but for all guerrilla fighters, all those who refused submission. The work exposes the fragility of brute material power and affirms instead the resilience of human will and spiritual resistance.
In Peace and the Bird, Diem Phung Thi turns to a material in complete opposition to B-52 wreckage, shell casings, or bronze: white foam, weightless and fragile. The forms remain minimal and modernist, yet the work sheds the physical gravity of metal and stone—materials long associated with her sculptural practice. This shift in material is not merely formal. It signals a collective longing: after prolonged immersion in gunfire and the darkness of mourning, there arises a need for something radically other—bright, light, buoyant—to draw life back from pain and loss.
At the same time, Diem Phung Thi situates many works from this period under a regenerative symbol of life: the female body. Notably, these figures are often rounded and voluptuous, evoking maternal forms. The woman may appear lying with rolled up legs, sleeping at midday, gazing at the moon, or waiting; elsewhere she emerges as a figure of strength, embodied in the image of a female fighter. In Diem Phung Thi’s art of the 1960s, womanhood becomes a site of absolute grace—where tenderness and resilience coexist at the threshold of total destruction.
War stands in opposition to the softness and lightness of the female body. Within the same historical moment, Diem Phung Thi’s practice occupies two opposing forces: destruction and nurture. If humanity is the agent capable of bringing about annihilation, then the feminine—by virtue of its nurturing nature—becomes a bearer of life. Yet the female body in these works does not function as an allegory of peace. Instead, it articulates a different sculptural logic: one that is rounded, yielding, and sustaining. Softness here is neither soothing nor consolatory; it operates as a form of resistance against the brutality and violence of war.
As Diem Phung Thi once wrote, an artist may claim a rightful place in the society of the future only by developing an understanding of monumentality and recognizing the necessity of integrating their work into its surrounding environment. Her own “monuments,” however, ultimately refuse both the title and function of the monument itself. They challenge the assumption that only what appears triumphant or heroic is worthy of inscription and commemoration. In place of monumentality, Diem Phung Thi foregrounds human pliancy—an insistence on softness as a mode of endurance amid moments of violence.
Images in this article are reproduced from the first edition of The Art of Diem Phung Thi, currently on view at Gallery Medium in conjunction with the exhibition Womb Of Fire. All proceeds from book sales will be donated to support communities affected by flooding.
