Ta Ty's artistic career makes a particular case in the history of modern Vietnamese art. He is recognized as the first Vietnamese artist to employ the cubist style in the early 1950s. His later works gravitate towards abstraction.

Born in 1921 in Hanoi, he was fond of music at a young age. During hign school, he found his interest in painting. He was admitted to I'Ecole des Beaux-Arts de I'lndochine in 1938. He often visited libraries to read art books and French newspapers, such as L'illustration, including works by Paul Gaugin, Henri Matisse, Van Gogh, and Picasso.

ln 1951, he had his first solo exhibition in Hanoi, including 60 paintings in a quasi-cubist style. Ta Ty was also prolific in writing fiction, poetry, script, and journalism. He found it hard to address war topics through painting; instead, he expressed his opinions in many of his writings and illustrations. Between the 1960s-1970s, Ta Ty was very much entrenched in the intellectual community in Saigon, and he made a series of portraits of notable writers, poets, and actors living in South Vietnam.

Notably, Ta Ty promoted cubism and abstraction in the Saigon art community, and seen as a mentor by many young artists who lived in South Vietnam during the 1960s-70s.