Photographer Jean-Baptiste Huynh’s Message to Bem from Paris
Jean-Baptiste Huynh was born in France in 1966 to a French mother and a Vietnamese father. He taught himself photographic lighting and printing techniques, which he mastered to the point of developing a personal style.
“Dear Bem, Jean-Baptiste — Nice to what we exchanged through email. This is my latest works that I have done in Africa with the amazing “flower children” and incredible people I lived with. And I really want to invite you to Paris to see all these new works that I love, and I would love to see your works as well whenever you come, or I come to see you in Hue. So, let’s stay in touch. Big hugs. Big kisses. You are charming, young friend from Vietnam.”
Jean-Baptiste Huynh was born in France in 1966 to a French mother and a Vietnamese father. He taught himself photographic lighting and printing techniques, which he mastered to the point of developing a personal style. His pure and timeless photography is recognizable in widely varied subjects, including portraits, nudes, minerals, and plants, as well as spiritual symbols and emblematic masterpieces. Jean-Baptiste Huynh’s running themes include the human gaze, our self-image, interplaying light, a sense of timelessness, and an attempt to capture infinity.
Jean-Baptiste Huynh considers the staging of his installations – their scenography – along with the conception of his books, as integral parts of his artistic vision. He has personally authored fifteen books.
Villa Médicis Hors-Les-Murs bursary laureate, Jean-Baptiste Huynh has exhibited in major galleries and museums worldwide. In 2002, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie presented the exhibition Yeux along with a book of his portraits of major international photographers and painters. In 2006, the National School of Fine Arts in Paris devoted a retrospective to Jean-Baptiste Huynh, Le Regard à l’oeuvre, which brought together his studies of the human face in a variety of world cultures. Between 2006 and 2012, he compiled a study of light through six photographic projects: MIRRORS (2006), TWILIGHT (2007), FIRE (2008), MONOCHROME (2009), LOUVRE (2010) and BLIND (2011), all assembled in the book Lumièrealong with the personal exhibition Rémanence hosted by the Louvre.
In 2016, the Guimet National Museum of Asian Arts in Paris approached Jean-Baptiste Huynh for a carte-blanche exhibition that finally opened in 2019. A retrospective of his work in Asia, the exhibition was developed with new photographs taken from the museum’s archives from 2016 through 2018, along with images from the REFLECTION series focused on the diversity of female faces in Asia.
The same year, Jean-Baptiste Huynh exhibited WOMAN, a project showcasing the universal, timeless beauty of the female face at the Galerie Lelong in Paris. This was accompanied by a series of interviews on the theme of “beauty” with leading figures from a variety of backgrounds. In 2019, the artist also showed his work at the Patrick Gutknecht Gallery in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, Russia.
In 2020, Jean-Baptiste Huynh has been working on his latest exhibition and book project, examining the concept of aesthetics and ancestral rites in Kenyan tribes.
Jean-Baptiste Huynh’s work is represented by the Galerie Lelong (France), the Patrick Gutknecht Gallery (Switzerland), and the Camera Work Gallery (Germany).