Night / Đêm 1999, 2023

Sơn ta, or Vietnamese lacquer, is duality: material and technique, liquid and impermeable, shadow and light.

Beginning as sap from the rhus succedanea tree
Coaxed into brown or black, if worked with tools in wood or iron
Hardening when cured with a precise humidity
Sanded and polished, layer by layer into depths, revealing details in eggshell, snail shell, and mother-of-pearl; to be hued with color pigments, silver powder, and gold leaf –

Time, illuminated.
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Tôn-Thất Minh-Nhật is a Huế-based artist whose work in Vietnamese lacquer transcends surface, plays with stillness, captures change. His works are a meditation on time.

At once painterly and sculptural, Minh-Nhật’s mastery of technique allows for an exploitation of the dimensionality of sơn ta, compelling the viewer to plumb the black depths of the material through fields of color, and to register the nuances of shadow through luminosity.

Surrounding a number of paintings, Minh-Nhật’s engravings on wood frames reference the architectural language of royal temples in the artist’s hometown. The title of each work draws upon Chinese shuǐ-mò (水墨 / ink and wash) painting, where imagery of nature are gestural, poetic expressions of human feeling and emotion.

Perhaps, like modern poetry and other contemporary art forms, Minh-Nhật’s lacquer paintings contain within themselves the key to reading them: surface is depth; juxtaposition is narrative; process is meaning.