Do Manh Cuong

Do Manh Cuong was born in Hanoi in 1981.

He is widely recognized as one of the distinctive voices of contemporary Vietnamese fashion. Yet long before he found his path in the world of fabric, silhouettes, and the runway, his first encounter with art began with painting.

After three unsuccessful attempts to pursue his dream of studying journalism, Do Manh Cuong spent six months learning to draw and, unexpectedly, was accepted into three art schools. He chose to study ceramics at Hanoi University of Industrial Fine Arts, where his passion for painting, sculpture, and the visual arts began to take shape in earnest.

Two years later, he left Hanoi for France. In Paris, Do Manh Cuong graduated in Fashion Design from the Chambre Syndicale de la Couture Parisienne. His graduation collection ranked among the school’s highest-achieving projects and was presented at the Louvre Museum. He was also selected for an internship at the House of Dior before returning to Vietnam to build a career of his own.

But Paris gave him more than an education in fashion. The years he spent there opened the door to a much broader world of art. During countless visits to museums and galleries, he would often linger for long periods before paintings, fascinated by the ways artists constructed space, created light, and used color to express what could not be put into words.

For a time, the dream of becoming a painter came vividly into focus. Yet Do Manh Cuong chose fashion as the beginning of his professional journey. From his 2007 collection Solitude, to the DMC brand, and later the founding of SIXDO in 2020, he gradually built a fashion system with its own scale, identity, and visual language. As SIXDO grew into a stable and established operation, the desire to paint—a desire that had seemingly fallen dormant—began to return.

Flowers and plants have always occupied a special place in Do Manh Cuong’s aesthetic universe. In his fashion work, roses, gardens, butterflies, and organic forms have repeatedly appeared as part of his signature visual vocabulary. In painting, however, flowers are no longer confined to the surface of a dress; they are completely liberated through color.

The exhibition Seasons of Flowers in Memory, comprising 45 works of varying sizes, marks the first time Do Manh Cuong has presented in full the world of painting he has quietly preserved for many years.

The subjects in his works remain recognizable: flowers in full bloom, rows of trees, the surface of a lake, or carefully arranged vases of flowers. Yet he does not seek to reproduce nature with literal accuracy. Instead, the landscape is filtered through emotion and reconstructed through thick layers of paint and vigorous, short, continuous brushstrokes. Contrasting colors are placed boldly against one another.

Đỗ Mạnh Cường’s use of color evokes the spirit of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionist painting, while still carrying the unmistakable sensibility of someone shaped by fashion. Some passages of color appear layered, raised, almost embroidered directly onto the surface of the canvas. His compositions are richly decorative, at times so densely constructed that flowers, leaves, ceramic vessels, and landscapes seem to dissolve into one another within a single field of color.

He does not paint flowers as specimens to be described with precision. He paints the feelings they leave behind: vitality, fragility, joy, memory, and even the quiet traces of solitude concealed beneath their radiant beauty.

Seasons of Flowers in Memory is not an unexpected change of direction. It is a return to Do Manh Cuong’s point of origin—a place where painting existed before fashion, and where it has continued to live quietly within him for more than two decades.

Fashion taught him how to organize form upon the body. Painting gives him the freedom to let color escape every silhouette and constraint.

In this garden, those two journeys have finally met.