The late 1990s marked the emergence of portraiture as a defining element of Bui Huu Hung’s work. His figures, often drawn from imagined or historical pasts, are depicted in traditional attire and imbued with symbolic roles tied to specific cultural and temporal contexts, sometimes inscribed directly onto the surface.

In Solitude, a young Vietnamese woman sits motionless, her stillness recalling the permanence of sculpture, inspired by The Thinker by Rodin. The figure evokes the condition of Vietnamese intellectuals in the 1990s, a period shaped by economic embargo and social isolation, when aspirations for recognition often went unheard. Across his career, Bui Huu Hung expanded this portrait language into works of varying scales, from figures and still life to scenes of family life, royal courts, and rural settings.