About

Kim Thao
Painter | Lives and works in Munich

Born in Hanoi and raised in Munich, Kim Thao is a self-taught artist whose journey into painting began far from the studio. She holds a Master’s degree in Management and Technology from the Technical University of Munich.

It was during the global pandemic that Thao discovered her passion for oil painting. What began as a playful experiment, overlaying comic characters onto thrifted oil paintings to revive forgotten canvases with humor and joy, shaped by childhood memories, soon evolved into a personal transition.

Since 2021, Thao’s work has drawn inspiration from the masters of Renaissance and Baroque painting, which she reinterprets through the lens of abstraction, surrealism, and contemporary life. Her canvases, often large in scale, serve as emotional landscapes where historical references dissolve into dreamlike compositions. Light, at once a subject and a sensation, is the inspiration to her practice. Influenced by the Impressionist approach to atmosphere and perception, she renders light as a metaphysical force: a canopy of leaves, a guiding presence across surreal terrain, or a symbol of inner awareness. Through light, her paintings become spaces of reflection.

In 2024, Thao began an intensive study of human anatomy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, deepening her engagement with figuration and the expressive possibilities of the body. Her current work approaches the human form not only as physical structure but as metaphor, an unstable vessel through which to explore themes of longing, alienation, desire, and love. Raised between Vietnamese and German cultures, Thao draws upon her bicultural experience to investigate identity from a position of in-betweenness. The sense of carrying multiple selves, of being both within and outside of place, echoes throughout her paintings. Through a fusion of anatomical precision and abstraction, she renders the figure as fragmented, distorted, or partially obscured, mirroring the psychological and cultural dislocations of a technologically mediated world.

Kim Thao lives and works in Munich, where her practice continues to unfold in dialogue with light, the human body, and the quiet complexities of cultural and emotional life.