Vietnamese Lacquer Painting

Lacquer arrived as a craft for temple furniture and objects, using resin tapped from the son tree, applied in many thin coats over a wood panel and polished with charcoal and water between them. In the 1920s and 1930s students at the fine arts school in Hanoi began using it as a painting medium, adding crushed eggshell for white, which the resin cannot produce, along with gold and silver leaf and mother-of-pearl. Nguyen Gia Tri is the name most associated with the result. The surface is built up and then sanded back under running water until the buried layers reappear, so the painter works partly by removal and cannot fully predict the outcome.

What you actually see

• Eggshell inlay - crushed duck eggshell laid into the resin for whites and cracked texture.
• Gold and silver leaf - laid under translucent coats so it glows through the finished surface.
• The sanding stage - the panel worked back under water to bring buried layers up again.
• Ha Thai village - a lacquer village south of Hanoi where workshops take visitors.

When to go

Any time of year. Workshops in the villages south of Hanoi work on weekday mornings and are quieter than the city galleries. The national fine arts museum in Hanoi holds the best collection of the 1930s generation and is closed on Mondays. Lacquer takes days to cure between coats, so a workshop visit shows stages rather than a piece finished end to end.

Honest expectations

Most lacquer sold to visitors is factory work on plywood with synthetic resin rather than tapped son, and the price gap against the real thing is large. Genuine panels are heavy and expensive. Raw resin causes skin reactions in some people, which is why workshops keep visitors back from the tapping. Gallery staff can be persistent about a sale.

Nearby

Ha Thai and the other Thuong Tin craft villages lie together on the road south of Hanoi.