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Listening to Stillness: Nguyễn Tuấn Cường and the Art of Vietnamese Lacquer Painting

by Hạnh Dương| August 9, 2025 | Art

Photo © by Nguyễn Tuấn Cường

For as long as I can recall, I have held in my heart a deep and enduring love for authentic Vietnamese culture — not for what gets laboriously placed before the tourist’s gaze in travel books and museum exhibits but for the culture itself, embedded in daily existence, in the weathered lines of objects, in the unobtrusive pulse of Vietnamese everyday routine.

What has attracted me are the things worn by time, not just for the sake of nostalgia, but because I believe that in the turmoil of modern life, only the old, the frayed, and the familiar can slow us down, providing us a breath of quiet, a moment to collect ourselves and remember who we are. To me, tradition isn’t past, but present. It lingers in the scent of aging wood, in the yellow enamel bowls that in other times had served the past generations, in grandmothers’ passed-down lullabies. It is there inthese tiny, unspoken shards that the power of our culture persists gently, strongly, authentically. This is the kind of beauty I strive for: not blinding but abiding.

In searching for the restrained beauty of conventional arts, I remained in place for a very long while before the artwork of sơn mài — Vietnamese lacquer. It is a material where hands, time, and Vietnamese spirit subtly entwine. It is less ostentatious and flashythan silk and ceramics are prone to be. And yet, it has its own soft, insistent way of caressing the observer lightly, but strongly.

Later on, I encountered the work of Nguyễn Tuấn Cường.

Born in 1978 and graduating from the Hanoi University of Industrial Fine Arts in 2001, Cường has devoted himself to lacquer. As a member of the Hanoi Fine Arts Association as well as the Vietnam Fine Arts Association, he works almost entirely in traditional sơn mài, using natural products like sơn ta (lacquer sap), gold leaf, silver leaf, and eggshell, building on the rich heritage of Vietnamese sơn mài while transforming it through contemporary sensibilities. As both an internationally exhibiting artist and an academic, he has established himself as one of the most accomplished and respected lacquer artists.

But more than technical virtuosity, what defines Cường’s work is his philosophy.

“The gloom of old temples left a lasting impression with me,” he once wrote. “All the color there is given an undertone of black. The gentle, elusive light appears to come from gilded Buddha images encrusted with the brown of aged lacquer. Resin brown,wood brown darkened by age, black, moss green—these are religious colors, and they are deeply ingrained in Vietnamese life.”

The first time I encountered one of Nguyễn Tuấn Cường’s works, I found myself stunned before a canvas not characterized by richness, but by solidity. It was a painting of a bowl — an ordinary, creased enamel bowl — so realistically rendered it seemed to be living. Not polished, not idealized. It just was. Its rim chipped, its pale blue faded to something almost ghostly, the bowl rested ever so slightly askew on a darkened ground, emanating not surface light but a glow from deep within the layers of lacquer. It didn’t proclaim beauty; it remembered it — the kind of remembering carried in your bones, like a scent from childhood. Standing before it, I felt like I was the one seen rather than the one seeing. Something stirred inside me.

Photo © by Nguyễn Tuấn Cường

Cường’s bowls are never just objects. They are symbols, suspended in a space that is somewhere between memory and dream. They are, in his own words, “fleeting illusions drifting through the stream of time.”

Perhaps the artist does not necessarily intend for his bowls to so often evoke temple rooms, their dulled enamel, the reminder of impermanence in the Buddhist creed; their gentle sheen, of light from within. These pieces of art are not still lifes; they are meditations. They are not trying to be above time, but to hold it carefully, as a monk might hold a broken bell in the palm of his hand.

All of them usher the viewer into a world of quiet. In a society conditioned by swift consumption and the plethora of images that aim to communicate immediately, his bowls necessitate slowness. They aren’t painted to surprise; they’re painted to reveal. To breathe gently.

And that gentle breath cuts deep.

Time passes slowly as I sit before one of Cường’s bowls. I am reminded not just of the process of lacquer: layer after layer, polish after polish, but of the Vietnamese philosophy that attends it: do not force, do not rush, allow nature to mature. Sơn ta does not dry in sun or wind. It ripens only in damp air. It requires patience. It hears the earth.

Of the many materials used in traditional arts, few have provoked so much inner searching as Vietnam’s native lacquer sap, sơn ta. Sơn ta is the blood and life of sơn mài painting, an organic spirit drawn from the very core of the Vietnamese earth. Sơn ta is not produced in sterile test tubes, nor is it the result of a formula created in modern laboratory tubes. It is a product of nature, a product of the gentle northern Vietnamese hills, where weather, land, and the cycles of human existence all softly cooperate to feed the lacquer trees from which this precious sap is harvested.

The harvesting of sơn ta is no drudgery but an initiation of patience and soft comprehension. The craftsman must cut patiently, gently as threads of silk, into the bark of the tree, and wait, occasionally for hours, while each drop of sap oozes laboriously out. A reflection of the nature of the craft itself: slow, quiet, respectful. No space for speed, no space for contempt. In one misplaced slash of the sword, the tree may be permanently damaged, ruining the quality of the sap and spoiling a whole season’s labor.

And even when this living material is in your hands, the work has only just started. The work then proceeds to the slow, laborious task of washing it, straining, mixing, resting, according to secrets transmitted not on paper but through oral tradition and the practice handed down through the generations. The formula for the lacquer is not recorded on paper; it is in hard hands, in the rhythm of the stirring, in unspoken trust between master and apprentice.

In sơn ta, one does not only discover a raw material but the Vietnamese sense of being: tenacious, rooted, and very much in contact with the earth. It is a perception that knows no division between time and nature, where time is not ticked away by the clock, but gauged by the ripening of nature, and success is not hurried, but earned, drop by irreplaceable drop.

What puzzles me perhaps most is the character of sơn ta. It will not dry out in sunlight. It resists windy drought. It ripens only in wet humidity, a condition which seems to defy every contemporary manufacturing taboo and yet expresses an extremely Vietnamese nature.

Sơn ta resists human timetables. It will not be rushed. It urges us to find a slower pace, a way of listening not only to the thing itself, but to the weather, the seasons, the secret rhythms of the world. It is as though the lacquer is urging us to live with, rather than on, the world. To be a sơn ta master, one has to listen to the wind, to the sky, to the subtlety of change, and cooperate with nature and not against it.

Cường’s painting also listens.

In sơn mài, I don’t merely observe technique; I observe dedication. The procedure, measured and time-consuming, is ritual, practically sacramental in its rhythm. It demands attention, humility, and respect for time itself. In this medium, I discovered that tradition isn’t fixed. As artists like Cường bring it to life, it changes. And in their hands, it continues to whisper, quietly but profoundly, to the heart of each following generation. As a university lecturer developing lacquer curricula, he is helping to cultivate the next generation of Vietnamese lacquer artists. 

Cường has exhibited his work widely, from group exhibitions in the UK, France, Switzerland, China, South Korea, and Taiwan, to his solo shows in Hanoi. His solo exhibition at Manzi Art Space in 2021 drew attention, as do his own paintings. Year after year, with shows such as “Stories of Lacquer,” “The Way of Lacquer,” and “Truong Ca,” he demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Vietnamese lacquer painting to the contemporary world. 

To love Cuong’s lacquer is to stop. To look closely. To linger.

But to love Vietnamese lacquer itself is to go even deeper: into the artists’ hands, working quietly, into the rhythm of generations who buff on and on so that something will catch, slowly, softly, significantly.

Although Cường’s work has moved me most profoundly, he is not alone. Across Vietnam, from quiet workshops tucked in Hanoi’s Old Quarter to experimental collectives in Saigon, there are still those who give themselves entirely to this demanding, meticulous art form. Some, like Cường, build their careers layer by layer; others pass on the secrets without a name, in backrooms or among students. What unites them is not recognition, but reverence.

In a world that’s increasingly speed-addicted, these artists live and labor in the pace of sơn mài. And in doing so, they’re not just preserving a craft, they’re holding on to a worldview. That time, attention, and laziness are not the enemies of progress but its foundation.

There have been hours when I’ve sat before a lacquer painting, never saying a word, just staring. Staring like I’m listening. Staring like I’m conversing with an old person, one who no longer tells with words, but with grooved texture and hairline crack, heavy over piled-up color like memories soft piled upon memories.

The longer you look, the clearer you perceive: sơn mài does not yell. It whispers. And only the quiet listeners can hear.

There is a quiet magic to lacquer work that the longer you look is revealed to you. It’s in the quiet dance of what you see and what you don’t, between what you’re told and what you must sense. A lacquer painting has no concern for the surface, but only for what it conceals. Its light is other than that of oil paint, which bounces from the canvas, or watercolor, percolating through in translucence. The light of lacquer seems to emanate from within, as though from some concealed fire burning in the ground.

It does not glitter. It does not flare. But it is entrancing.

Perhaps that is the reason why sơn mài is less concerned with making an immediate visual impact than with inspiring the viewer to reflect. It demands patience. It calls upon the viewer to slow his own pace, to release his own speed, to meet it where it speaks for itself.

In an age increasingly besotted with transitory images and momentary emotions, lacquer work is a revolution of reticence. It defies speed. It coaxes us to wait, to breathe in synchronism with it, to step back from sound into silence. It connects us with ourselves. And the biggest miracle is its capacity to mend and bring us together.

Although I have a special fondness for lacquer painting, I do have to admit a discomfiting fact: the medium is now confronted with crossroads full of danger. In a time dominated by speed and thinness, when a click can produce images, effects, and even what we are now emboldened to call “art,” an art that takes months, even years, to complete one piece is now considered to be a luxury. A luxury in terms of time, effort, and faith.

Lacquer is not for the impatient. It is difficult to learn, valuable to collectors, expensive to produce, and most crucially, requires a kind of patience few are still willing to develop. In the meantime, the aesthetic sensibilities of the time trend towards what is easy to understand, easy to install, easy to ignore. 

Many lacquer masters have shut down their workshops. They recede into invisibility, taking with them the secrets and the soul of the art. Even the younger generation might not know that it exists. And if they have heard of sơn mài at all, for them it is as a relic. Not many are given the chance, or the fate, to witness it firsthand.

And yet, I believe that this art still has a future. Not because it will be trendy once more. Not because it will be mass-produced as digital prints or copied to infinity, but because there are still human beings who care. Artists like Nguyễn Tuấn Cường. Teachers. Students. Witnesses who, upon looking at one painting, halt. Who breathe. Who sense something shift.

Maybe that is sufficient.

Culture does not need noise to survive. It needs only those who quietly tend its flame. Like the lacquer maker working repeatedly — layering, polishing, layering, polishing — not to render anything immediately visible, but so that, somewhere, someday, something glows.

I am no collector, and I am no artist. I am simply a lover, a lover of lacquer, one who cherishes it with a soft, innocent love, the kind of love you would have for the scent of a precious memory, for the music faintly echoing beneath the din of the world, or for the worn seam of time at the heart of a people.

And if one day, a viewer pauses before a lacquer painting, without knowing why — to catch her breath and find something unuttered stirring within — then perhaps that is all we ever need.

Because beauty does not shout.

It merely waits.