This young Vietnamese artist gets compared to Jackson Pollock and his pictures sell for $150,000 and up. But as his first solo London show opens, he talks about the future, donating to charity and the fact that he’s ‘just a kid’

Xeo Chu is even more of a rebuke to slacker teens than this suggests. He combines the precocity of Diego Rivera (who began drawing at the age of three) with the great-heartedness of Marcus Rashford. When he was 10, Chu had his first painting exhibition in Singapore and used the $20,000 proceeds to support heart surgery funds, the elderly living alone and street children in his city.

And last summer, he proved himself to be at the cutting-edge of art during a show in Ho Chi Minh City that could be visited virtually by art lovers around the world, thanks to a wheeled telepresence robot that enabled spectators to look closely at 30 different paintings created during the pandemic. It also allowed them to interact with Xeo Chu as he painted live.