Mai Khanh PHAM TO

Born in Paris in 1975 into a Vietnamese family, Mai Khanh Pham To began her life between contrasting cultures and horizons. A political refugee from the age of six months, she grew up in New Caledonia, where the vastness of the Pacific shaped her sensory imagination and her quest for meaning.

It was in Paris that she discovered painting at the turn of the 2000s, in the studio of painter Milaine Lung, where she acquired the technical fundamentals inherited from Nicolas Wacker’s teaching at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Gradually, her work evolved from figurative painting toward a lyrical abstraction, resolutely meditative and immersive.

Expanding her practice internationally, she moved to New York to deepen her knowledge at The Art Students League, attending classes with Frank O’Cain and Kikuo Saito—experiences that refined her sensitivity to color, composition, and emotion.

Now based in France, Mai Khanh continues to explore large-scale abstraction, seeking to evoke in the viewer an intimate experience of space, between real landscape and inner landscape. Her work invokes the four elements—air, water, fire, earth—woven as poetic impressions, where each canvas becomes a journey.

More recently, she has begun a practice she calls “investigation into the poetic object,” a field where painting, text, and poetry interact, opening new sensory and narrative dimensions in her work.