The revival of Vietnamese lacquer in the 20th century

conference at 18:00 p.m. by Anne Fort, Curator in charge of the Southeast Asia and Central Asia collection at the Cernuschi Museum.

The exhibition on the theme of lacquer in the permanent collections of the Cernuschi Museum will be an opportunity to revisit this typically Vietnamese craft, which gained the status of an artistic discipline from 1930, in the wake of the transformations carried out by the Indochina School of Fine Arts in Hanoi and its director Victor Tardieu, on Vietnamese arts.

Lacquer has been used in East Asia for nearly 4000 years. Originally, it was used to protect and then embellish objects.

At the end of the 19th century, the French established in Indochina praised the mastery of Vietnamese lacquer artisans. Lacquered and mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture, decorative panels, and boxes were appreciated by this new clientele.

In the 1930s, artisanal lacquer work was at the heart of a renewal undertaken by the Indochina School of Fine Arts in Hanoi. Lacquer now became the support material for a hybrid art synthesizing certain traditional motifs and the pictorial styles in force in Europe, particularly in the Art Deco movement. The term son ta, "artisanal lacquer", is completed by the term lacquer painting, “lacquer painting”, a new genre of plastic expression.