Dallas artist Du Chau Wins Lifetime Achievement Award

Donna Tennant·
Dallas/Ft WorthVisual Art
·

In 1981, artist Du Chau and his family left Vietnam, emigrating to Dallas. Over the past four decades, Chau has exhibited extensively, curated more than 50 exhibitions, taught art, and co-founded an art center.

In 2024, Chau received the Moss/Chumley North Texas Artist Award, recognizing his contributions to the North Texas art community. The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University presents the award annually to a North Texas artist with a record of exhibiting professionally for 10 years, as well as community advocacy.

According to one of the jurors, Meadows Museum Assistant Registrar Ashley Lee, “Chau’s remarkable contributions exemplify the spirit of artistic excellence and community engagement that the Moss/Chumley Award celebrates.”

Chau is one of the founders and the exhibition coordinator of the Goldmark Cultural Center in north Dallas, an arts center with 170 artist studios and three exhibition galleries. He has taught art at Dallas College’s Brookhaven campus for more than two decades.

Chau currently shows with Erin Cluley Gallery, where he had his first solo show in 2023 after showing previously with the Liliana Bloch Gallery.

Chau arrived in Dallas at the age of 13 and entered school in the seventh grade, speaking no English. After graduation, he studied pathology at the University of North Texas, but his favorite class was watercolor. His parents were practical, pragmatic people, advising him that he should not be an artist because he wouldn’t be able to support himself.

After Chau was established as a pathology technical coordinator at Methodist Hospital of Dallas, he made time to pursue his art. “I am still working because, after 25 years, the money is not coming in from making art,” he said during a visit with Chau in his studio at Goldmark last summer. “Everyone who works here donates their time to the center, so the studio rent is very affordable.”

Chau attended art classes at Brookhaven College in his free time before taking a sabbatical from his job to pursue a BFA (2001) and MFA (2003) at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. “I had a summer residency at Alfred, and I just didn’t return,” he said. “I love my job, but I am grateful I could take time off to study ceramics.”

Chau’s ceramic and wire sculptures are inspired by his childhood memories of Vietnam and organic patterns in nature. His most impressive sculptural installations are labor intensive, often consisting of hundreds of ceramic elements suspended with piano wire. These elements are cast from things like seeds, miniature soldiers, white doves, hearts, pinecones, his hands, or anything with a shape that intrigues him. In the case of his porcelain hands, they range from tiny to small and are arranged in a spiral configuration on a flat surface. The hearts are strung on wire and attached to an abstract painting. The soldiers are suspended from pieces of wire and attached to the wall.

“I transform these elements through repetition,” Chau said. “I hope my work is transformative. People don’t always realize that the red and yellow porcelain elements are soldiers. I lived through the Vietnam War, and much of my work references those years.”

Chau uses elements collected from nature as architectural components in his work. He creates what he refers to as “multiplicity to infinity,” using a modular, repetitious strategy. His installations are powerful due to the accumulation of repeated elements, often resulting in a meditative response by the viewer. Chau manipulates clay using various techniques, including slip casting and press molding. In addition to the ceramic pieces, he creates pigment and silkscreen prints and works in bronze and other media.

A Poem for Dad is a large bronze fish from which spring porcelain, flower-like elements suspended on wire, creating the illusion that the fish is swimming through an underwater garden. After Chau’s mother passed away from pancreatic cancer, his father, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s, came to live with him. When he wanted to eat fish but couldn’t chew it, Chau began cooking and blending it. Handling the whole fish gave him the idea to cast it.

Chau is a born caregiver, taking his father off Western medication and replacing it with smoothies containing berries, turmeric, and vegetables from his garden. He also supports two elderly aunts, one in Vietnam, who has since passed, and another in Hong Kong. “It’s just the cycle of life,” Chau said. “You plant seeds; they grow, die, and bear more seeds. That is how my grandfather explained the war to me.”

Despite his full-time job, Chau finds time to create work in the studio while supporting other artists. Recently, he conducted a workshop at the Glaze Ceramics Studio in Dallas and taught a class at the Meadows Museum. He is bringing a Nigerian woman artist and a Turkish professor to Goldmark, and he is working on two commissioned pieces—one for the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the other for Erin Cluley Gallery.

In early 2024, Chau’s career was recognized in a 25-year retrospective, The Silence That Speaks, at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Gallery director Christine Blackhurst wrote that “Du Chau is characterized by his gentle demeanor, kindness, creativity, hardworking nature, and generosity in all aspects of his life.”

In the exhibition catalogue, Chau wrote, “My mother taught me a valuable lesson that has stayed with me through life: we may lose everything, but as long as we are willing to work with our hands, hope will never be lost … This gives me hope that we can always find a way to rebuild and thrive, no matter the circumstances.”

—DONNA TENNANT

Donna Tennant

Donna Tennant is a Houston-based art historian who has been writing about art and artists for many years.