Thai engineer, Tira Vanichtheeranont, had very little money or knowledge of art when he started his collection, yet time and again he has stumbled upon treasure and now owns over 2,000 pieces.

The story that Tira Vanichtheeranont tells recalls the adage that truth is stranger than fiction.

The owner of an amazing collection of thousands of paintings by Vietnamese senior artists including at least seven works of Bui Xuan Phai, whose works are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars today, says he neither had a lot of money nor knew anything about art when he started his collection.

It was fate, an extraordinary stroke of luck, that delivered hundreds of paintings to him at astonishingly cheap prices, Vanichtheeranont says.

The Thai citizen came to Viet Nam 27 years ago as a private supplier of hardware, cable and switching equipment to HCM City Post and Telecommunications as well as Viet Nam Post and Telecommunications (VNPT) when the country had just embarked on its doi moi (economic renewal) process. He also supplied power cables to the HCM City Power Company.

During the two decades that he spent in the country, he gave no thought to paintings or collecting them. Hence, it was not that began his collection early and was able to get paintings for cheap prices.

"I don't have much money, but I got lucky. I was not an art lover before I saw the first paintings in my collection."

It was only in 2006, after he retired, that he turned his thoughts to doing something different. He wanted to do something interesting to spend most of his free time on.

"I chose to become an antique collector. I went to Vung Tau to buy Chinese ceramic items from a shipwreck found in the city.

Three years later, he met a friend from Ha Noi, also an antique dealer, who wanted to sell him a set of more than 200 paintings for US$30,000 – 40,000.

Tira liked the collection very much because he felt the paintings were beautiful, but he did not know their value.

"I was brave to buy those paintings, without having any knowledge about them. But before making the decision to buy them, I bought a lot of books about paintings to read and talked to several painters."

As he learnt more about Vietnamese paintings, he recognized their beauty and great value, he said.

Now, the retired engineer has more than 2,000 paintings and sketches by renowned Vietnamese artists who were trained at Indochina College of Fine Arts, the earliest art school in Indochina using a Western curriculum, in the 1925 to the 1945.

In 2010, just one year after the former student of the DeVry Technology Institute in Chicago bought his first paintings, he organised the first exhibition in Ha Noi.

Later, he collaborated with painter Phan Cam Thuong who helped him write a book introducing 28 painters whose works were in his collection.

One of them, an octogenarian painter who was not very well known earlier, was grateful to the Thai collector for helping his works achieve greater recognition.

He agreed to sell more than 220 sketches he had done for just $2,000.

The painter is Ton Duc Luong, a former student of the Indochina College of Fine Arts, now 88.

"He was very happy with me and he wanted to sell his set of sketches to me. I had told him I did not have much money," the collector said, adding, "He called every member of his large family come to meet me after a second book about him and his paintings was published."

Tira said that the money he spent for printing books is much more than the amount he spent on buying paintings.

His destiny to be a collector of Vietnamese paintings was confirmed strongly when he met Nilkamhaeng Passama, the Thai wife of Petro Paris, a former Commercial Counselor for the Italian embassy. When Paris died, he left his collection of 130 Vietnamese paintings to her.

During an auction of antiques in Bangkok, Tira was introduced to Nilkamhaeng, who later agreed to sell him the whole collection for just $29,000 because she did not know any thing about painting.

In a later conversation, he said one of seven Bui Xuan Phai's paintings in his collection was put in auction for $60,000 in Singapore. He does not know who took the photo from his facebook and post in the auction for this amount of money.

"In the hand of the people who do not know the real value, it is just a piece of painting for them. At the time when I purchased, I was not so sure that they are authentic paintings, but with the total price of 130 pieces of works, even only one tenth of the paintings are authentic, then it is already a good investment," said Tira.

He also met several some of painters in Ha Noi and they all knew this Italian collector. This means that he is a real arts collector at the time he worked in the capital.

Tira said one of the reasons that he could buy a lot of rare Vietnamese paintings is that "Vietnamese painters think their own paintings have no value. But I, as a foreigner, think very differently. Viet Nam has a long history of war and culture. We can find it in the priceless art works by senior Vietnamese artists".

Vietnamese senior art critic Phan Cam Thuong said Tira's is a very valuable collection.

"These works clearly reflect the life of Vietnamese people in the second half of the 20th century, in different styles."

Nora A. Taylor, a professor of the Alsdorf Foundation on Southeast Asian Art History, the Chicago Art Institute, was also quoted by a VietnamNet report as saying Vanichtheeranont's sketch collection has special historical value.

"In many aspects, Tira's collection is more valuable than other modern and contemporary collections, including those owned by Southeast Asian art museums," Taylor said.

An exhibition of 100 paintings of famous Vietnamese artists from Tira's collection is now on display at the HCM City Fine Arts Museum till January 22, 2013.

Included in the exhibition are works of famous Vietnamese artists like Nguyen Gia Tri, Nguyen Tuong Lan, To Ngoc Van, Bui Xuan Phai, Mai Van Nam and Nguyen Sang.

Tira said he has spent a lot of money to organise several exhibitions of his collection in order to introduce Vietnamese history, culture and art to both Vietnamese and foreigners.

After the exhibition, he plans to open a museum in Bangkok to display all the paintings in his collection, which also includes some works by Thai artists.

"As a foreigner who has worked in Viet Nam for over two decades, I have recognized the significance of these works. They must be introduced to historical researchers and art lovers," the 64-year old telecom expert said.

For Tira, each painting in his collection has been a history lesson. For each one of them, he had to research and find out a lot of information about its content and the situation it was composed in.

"I found researching and collecting paintings very interesting. After getting two paintings of two different painters, I found that they went together to the same place to compose, and shared colours."

VNS