Born in 1962, originally from Thái Bình
Co-author & Chief Editor
Vice President and Founding Shareholder, PICTURE Art Foundation

For more than 30 years, Hà Quốc Thái has devoted himself to the study, research, and collecting of Vietnamese art, with a particular focus on Indochinese art and Vietnamese art of the Resistance period—two important chapters in the formation of modern Vietnamese art.

Throughout this journey, he has devoted considerable time and effort to locating, collecting, and preserving significant paintings, sketches, and archival materials, tracing the provenance and stories behind each work. For him, collecting is a way of preserving important traces of art history before they are obscured by time or lost altogether.

His connection with the family of painter Nguyễn Gia Trí began in childhood through his friendship with Nguyễn Gia Tuệ, the artist’s son. Years later, an unexpected encounter with a work by Nguyễn Gia Trí brought him back into contact with Tuệ and set him on a journey to locate and reconnect the paintings, sketches, documents, and memories that remained of the artist.

This journey became an important foundation for Hà Quốc Thái’s work on Nguyễn Gia Trí – A Vietnamese Lacquer Legend, for which he serves as co-author and chief editor. He has helped bring together and organize materials and firsthand accounts from the artist’s family, collectors, and research sources, contributing to a fuller portrait of Nguyễn Gia Trí and the depth of the legacy he left behind.

Hà Quốc Thái is currently Vice President and Founding Shareholder of PICTURE Art Foundation, an organization dedicated to the research, preservation, publication, and wider dissemination of Vietnam’s artistic and cultural heritage.

More than three decades of collecting have led him to a simple conviction: to preserve a significant work of art is to preserve a fragment of Vietnam’s artistic memory. This book continues that journey—bringing to the public and to future generations the values he has spent decades seeking out, preserving, and safeguarding.