Vietnam

by Kenta Takeshige

An encounter between Vietnamese lacquer and French painting

In Vietnam, lacquer is called Sơn Ta.
Vietnamese lacquer painting, known as "Sơn Mài", is a relatively young art form that emerged in the 1930s under the influence of the École des Beaux-Arts (now Vietnam University of the Arts) in Hanoi in 1925, where French artists introduced Western modern art techniques. While lacquer painting itself is modern, the use of lacquer in Vietnam dates back over 2,000 years to the Đông Sơn culture. Lacquer art was applied to daily objects, architecture, and religious spaces.

At the Hanoi art school, students were trained in Western methods such as perspective, three-dimensionality, and realism, which they combined with traditional Vietnamese motifs, colors, and materials. This fusion gave rise to lacquer painting as a new artistic medium. Early works often depicted natural beauty, while later, during the socialist era, the art form served ideological purposes.

Since the 1980s, however, as Vietnam opened to the world, younger generations of artists have reimagined Sơn Mài, introducing innovative techniques and placing it firmly within a contemporary artistic context.

The art typically uses traditional colors - red, black, brown, yellow, and white - with inlays of eggshell, crab, and snail shells. Innovations expanded the palette with new shades, especially greens, and added depth through subtle shading, polishing methods, and layered textures. The technique itself is highly labor-intensive: an artist builds up numerous layers of colored and clear lacquer, often interspersed with silver leaf, and then carefully polishes parts of the surface to reveal the desired image. Thus, the final painting emerges not from direct application of paint, but from the subtractive process of polishing back through the layers to uncover hidden forms and colors.

This unique blend of ancient craftsmanship and modern artistic exploration has made Vietnamese lacquer painting a distinctive, expressive, and ever-evolving art form.