Nguyen Xuan Tiep became the first Vietnamese artist to participate in a major international exhibition when he contributed this work to the Gallery’s inaugural Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1993. During economic reforms that began in the 1980s, Nguyen had turned his back on the principles of the European Renaissance and Russian Socialist Realism in which he had been trained; instead, he embraced the traditional architecture, sculpture and painting of the Red River delta, while betraying sympathies for the idealistic paintings of Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse. Song of the buffalo boys II is one of several works Nguyen produced at the time idealising the Vietnamese countryside in a fragmentary compositional style intended to evoke memories of local spirituality and village life. Casting off aesthetic norms imposed from elsewhere, Nguyen sought to represent distinctly Vietnamese experiences.