For the American-Vietnamese collector Dr Tuan Pham, collecting Vietnamese art has been an educational and emotional adventure. ‘Vietnamese art is really about history and culture,’ he explains. ‘It tells you a story that you didn’t know before.’ The collector’s interest in the art from his homeland was sparked by a chance encounter in the late 1990s. ‘I just happened to walk by a gallery in South Florida, and as I approached the painting, I saw that it was signed in Chinese characters above the name Le Pho,’ Pham explains. He purchased the painting without realising that the artist Le Pho was in fact from Vietnam. ‘It was the first painting in my Vietnamese collection, and it started a personal journey that reconnects me with my birthplace,’ he says. Pham was born in Vietnam, but fled to the United States in 1975 as a 13-year-old refugee, escaping with his brother. Later, he moved from Florida to California where he met his wife, and in 1992 he founded Phamatech, a biotechnology company and laboratory that’s based in San Diego. ‘So many [20th-century Vietnamese] artists grew up in Vietnam but left Vietnam for France and made a career out of that,’ Pham explains. ‘I did the same thing. There’s always been a Vietnamese part of me and an American part of me, and this blending of the two cultures is similar to what I see in some of the artists’ work that I collect. It’s why I have enjoyed the collecting journey so much.’