November 23, 2018January 15, 2019 by admin

Vietnamese (visual) folk arts

Vietnamese Hàng Trống folk painting: Koi Fish recreated by Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Xuân Lam

In my previous post, I shared my finding about contemporary Vietnamese arts. A week ago I had a trip back to Vietnam and coincidentally, I was introduced to Ha Manh Thang – a well-known contemporary Vietnamese artist who has many exhibition in Vietnam and international. Although our first conversation last only for 20-30 minutes, I received very honest and helpful advices from him about my work as well as how I should approach the art scene in Vietnam. At the same time, showing other people my current project forces me to re-think about my aspiration. I decided to do the next round of research, but this time about Vietnamese folk arts – something that possibly falls on the other end of the spectrum compared to contemporary arts.

It is not surprising what I found when I did not include “visual” in my search query “Vietnamese folk arts”. But what I get to learn is totally unexpected, Vietnamese folk arts seems to mainly refer to folk visual arts and folk singing arts. I dug deep into the visual aspect, where folk painting is the dominant element, and below are the observations:

Theme: there are four main folk painting themes: Paintings for worship purpose: this kind of paintings are used a lot in temples, pagodas and private residences to pray for good luck and protection from bad luck. Paintings for celebration illustrate Vietnamese new year traditions, paintings about daily life portrait the Vietnamese people’s daily activities, and paintings about history are usually about memorable historic events or illustration of Vietnamese folk tales.
Content: each painting carries a single meaning about mankind and life. Folk paintings also reflect the people’s wishes, hopes and desires for simple or higher things in life. For example, the painting named “The Mommy Pig and the Piglets” expresses Vietnamese farmers’ wish for a sufficient life, while the Rooster Painting represents heroic bravery, perseverance and the five great traits: beauty, mental strength, physical strength, kindness, and stability.

Vietnamese Đông Hồ folk painting: Mommy pig and piglets

Printing method: Since folk printings are used in people’s daily life, they should be made at a very reasonable cost so that the majority of Vietnamese people can afford them. The common method to reproduce folk paintings is very similar to screen printing where the main lines will be carved into a wooden board. Once it is printed out, the artist will continue drawing the details until finish. People from minorities or ethnic groups like Tày, Nùng, Dao will paint the folk paintings painting 100% by hand.
Coloring method: colors in Vietnam folk paintings are made of natural ingredients: charcoal is used to create black color, copper rust for green, Hoè flowers for red and yellow, sea shell fine powder for shiny gold, etc.
Composition: the Vietnamese folk paintings are drawn to illustrate the liveliness rather than the likeliness. They usually do not follow the “rules” as we see in contemporary arts, their composition is meant to ease the eyes of the viewers, and to make the painting observable and understandable from different angles.
Families of painting: the painting families that used to be very popular in the past, and are preserved carefully in modern life includes: Đông Hồ, Hàng Trống, Kim Hoàng, Sinh village

These initial findings made me feel intrigued. Vietnamese folk arts, particularly the visual aspect, is not too broad as I thought. It is still a very big topic, but at least I don’t feel too overwhelmed to do more research to understand it better. I am excited to think about how I can incorporate Vietnamese cultural elements into my ceramic work creatively.