Thu Hiền’s entry into art was not shaped by inherited aesthetic privilege or early institutional validation, but rather by a self-directed decision to take the entrance exam for the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts—a decision marked less by certainty than by a willingness to explore. Coming from a non-artistic household, she did not grow up surrounded by the visual language she would later adopt, yet this very absence perhaps sharpened her sensitivity to form, texture, and the small rituals of daily life that now permeate her work.

It was during her time at the university that she encountered lacquer not merely as a national medium but as a living practice shaped by pedagogy, dialogue, and experimentation. She also met her husband there, a fellow lacquer artist, with whom she continues to sustain a quiet, mutual conversation around process and making—less as collaboration than as a parallel unfolding of craft within a shared material ecology.

While Thu Hiền ultimately gravitated toward acrylic on canvas as her primary medium, her approach remains materially alert and historically conscious. Instead of abandoning traditional modes, she incorporates multi-layered dó paper—Vietnamese handmade mulberry paper—onto her canvas surfaces, creating a subtle interplay between depth and absorbency. This technique allows her to modulate surface tension, slow down pigment absorption, and cultivate a distinct tactility that resists both flatness and excessive polish. The result is a body of work that exists in-between: contemporary in its syntax, yet embedded with vernacular material knowledge.

In speaking about her process, Hiền resists the rhetoric of innovation or authorship. “I’m neither the one who invented this nor the only one doing it,” she reflects. “Each artist has their own way of working—of discovering which techniques hold their essence.” This humility is not rhetorical but methodological: her works carry the trace of an artist who listens carefully to her materials and approaches tradition as a vocabulary to be inhabited rather than transcended.

Though Thu Hiền works primarily with acrylic and paper, her formal training in lacquer painting at the Ho Chi Minh City University of Fine Arts places her in an inherited lineage that is anything but traditionalist. Vietnamese lacquer, or sơn mài, is not simply a cultural material—it is a contested and hybridized medium, forged through colonial pedagogies and postcolonial reinventions. Lacquer, historically used for utilitarian and religious objects such as water puppets and temple furnishings, was thus reimagined as a modernist painting surface, capable of absorbing foreign techniques while preserving a native material identity.

This contradictory inheritance—between artisanal labor and pictorial abstraction, between colonial tutelage and national style—continues to reverberate in the ways younger artists like Thu Hiền approach surface and temporality. Her layering of dó paper atop canvas subtly echoes the multi-stage process of lacquer application: an additive and subtractive gesture that builds opacity while inviting translucency. While Hiền does not present her work as lacquer revivalism, her early exposure to its demanding process—a process historically bound to questions of authenticity, modernity, and national form—shapes her sensitivity to material memory and residual forms of touch. In this sense, sơn mài operates less as medium than as atmosphere: a lingering, stratified presence whose historical density quietly informs the surface logic of her current practice.

If lacquer defined one pole of Vietnam’s colonial-era aesthetic experimentation, silk marked another: less labor-intensive yet equally charged with symbolic and historical weight. While the use of silk as a painting surface in East Asia dates back centuries, its modern reinvention in Vietnam was catalyzed by colonial pedagogies at the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine. Artists like Nguyễn Phan Chánh, unable to master oil painting, adapted silk not as a nostalgic return to literati traditions but as a pliable support for Western spatiality—depth, shadow, and anatomical precision—applied to local motifs. The result was not a simple hybrid but a quiet defiance of both Chinese ink orthodoxy and French oil painting hegemony.

This strategic ambiguity continues to resonate in contemporary engagements with the medium. For artists like Thu Hiền, trained in both lacquer and silk, the textile’s fragility becomes less a limitation than a conceptual force: it invites opacity without density, gesture without spectacle. Her current work in acrylic on paper retains a textile-like softness and luminance, as though echoing the spectral transparency of silk without invoking its literal form. In this sense, silk functions less as an archival medium than as a ghostly infrastructure—absorbing color, resisting dominance, and allowing meaning to bleed without containment.

With its dense accretion and historical weight, the incorporation of lacquer and silk anchors Thu Hiền’s practice, evoking a multi-layered sense of impermanence, where the artist’s engagement with motherhood as a theme emerges precisely at their interstice. In Thu Hiền’s recent works, maternal time is neither mythologized nor framed as exceptional. Instead, it structures the gaze itself. Thu’s compositions linger on seemingly peripheral moments, whether in the curious, unflinching gazes the mother and daughter direct toward the viewer, or in the golden afternoon haze that bathes their shared moments of rest, the subtle disarray of lived-in spaces is rendered with a quiet exactitude that privileges presence over narrative.

Thu Hiền breaks the maternal as trope by presenting them as a glowing temporal condition: naptimes, messes, waiting, all nonlinear and intermittently fractured. The dull gleam of lacquer, the fibrous softness of paper, the bleeding edges of diluted acrylic—all index a mode of care that is neither triumphant nor sentimental, but durational, cumulative, and infrastructural. Rather than aestheticizing motherhood as a stable identity, Thu Hiền reframes it as an ecology of attention: distributed, weathered, and shaped by the minor. What emerges is not a heroic maternal figure, but a perceptual field where sensation, memory, and material seep into one another.

In the realm of art, this question often arises: "Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art?" For Thu Hiền, the answer is beautifully simple - life and art intertwine and inspire one another. They are inseparable, with each nourishing the other. or Thu Hiền, art is life itself - a means of self-care, a way to tend to herself and her family,

Through her artwork, Thu Hiền weaves together the threads of her life and her artistic journey. Her pieces become a harmonious tapestry that embraces the viewer, evoking a sense of familiarity and belonging. 

As I reflect on Thu Hiền's journey as an artist and as a person, I am inspired by her unwavering dedication, her ability to infuse art into every aspect of her life, and her profound love for her family. She reminds us that art is not a distant realm but a vibrant and integral part of our existence, capable of enriching our lives in unimaginable ways. Thu Hiền's story serves as a powerful reminder that when we wholeheartedly embrace our passions and nurture our inner artistic spirit, we can create a life that is both fulfilling and inspiring.

-

Image caption [from top to bottom]:

©Nguyen Thi Thu Hien, courtesy of the artist

Into the Summer, 2022

Goldern Afternoon, 2021

Edited by Frida Chen in July 2025.