Book excerpt: Tran Trung Tin painted in Hanoi during the 60s and 70s, conveying the experience of the Vietnamese and the essence of human emotion in his images. When he was 12, he joined the Resisitance against the French who were occupying Vietnam at the time, devoting his youth to freeing his country only to be disappointed by the repression and misery that folowed. Living in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, forbidden to express himself in words, he turned to painting to communicate the contradictions of his time.