There are many arts practiced in the far east which we rarely encounter here. The term for one of these is familiar enough. We use the word lacquer for highly glassed surfaces where the gloss is hard like glass and makes the colours below glow with a special intensity. This technique originated with the use of the sap from a tree. Câi Sơn or the Son tree (Rhus vernicifera related to the Smoke Bush tree) produces this gum as well as a number of poisonous qualities which mean that some people cannot even brush against its leaves without reacting badly. For many hundreds of years it has been cultivated so that artists and craftsmen could produce paintings, furniture and decorative objects that seem to glow in the dark.

The way to a village by Phung Pham 1995

Until I lived in Vietnam I had just used the term lacquer loosely to refer to any high gloss, for I had not experienced the depth and beauty of the original articles from which we have loosely taken the word. When first used our word stood for the varnish made from the gum of the tree, and so the word is also present in Shallac, by the 19th Century it had also become used of mean the wooden and painted objects covered with lacquer and imported from the Far East and India. These objects, pictures and furniture have a surface which seems like glass and which magnifies the colours beneath. In Vietnam this art is used to produce pictures which seem on fire with colour; saturated hues reproducing the heat of a tropical world in a man-made object. Today the technique is being used to great effect by modern artists making panels (for such they nearly always are) on which their art work takes many degrees of abstraction, for the technique inevitably lends itself to the abstract, and less to the literal.

'V' shapped cuts are made to let the gum run out

There is a good selection of these paintings in the National Museum of Fine Art in Ha Noi, a building well worth including in your time in Ha Noi as it gives a good snapshot of 20th Century developments in art in Vietnam. There is a book 'Vietnamese Lacquer Painting' by Quang Viet, published by The Fine Arts Publishing House (with an essay in English, although a Vietnamese text) which introduces the subject fully, or you can read an illustrated introduction (in English) to the art by the same author at (http://www.lachonggallery.com/articles/vietnamese_paintings_pioneers.htm). Words come a poor second when trying to convey any technique with which we are unfamiliar. So here I will pass to to the production of lacquer hoping you will hunt out its beauty and extraordinary aesthetic quality for yourself.

Oyster shells are used to catche the gum as it runs from the cut

Let me start with the tree. In Vietnam the sapling Son Tree (rhyming more with earn, and not with sun) is ready to be used when it is 5 or 6 years old. The bark is cut in a way which leaves a downward pointing V-shape and from that point the sap is drained. The cut is just the depth of the bark, maybe an eighth of an inch, and even thinner in width. An oyster shell is then secured at the base of the V catching the light cream coloured sap. Every four days or so another cut is made during the time that the sap is rising, each cut being placed contiguously above the previous. After a score or so of cuts, a space is left about the same height as the length of cuts below, and a new cut is made leaving an area of unharmed bark. Thus the trees have a series of wide V shaped notches running up their trunks – each representing a couple of months in the tree's life.

Each tree produces a few drops of gum a day, but half an acre of trees, maybe some 200, add up to over 3 Kilograms a month. A kilo brings its owners some ₤3, although this varies with the season. Seedlings are grown in plugs and so the cycle continues with little in the way of costs except to fund a sharp knife and a supply of oyster shells. Storage is in woven baskets made utterly watertight by the gum which takes on its extraordinary metallic hardness when it is exposed to the air for a few hours. Gathered and sealed into containers it is taken to the cities where artists and craftsmen purchase it for their work.

One of the neat woven containers with freshly gathered gum

While much of the gum is used for coating furniture and small household objects there is also a trade to artists to produce the kind of works referred to above. The other key ingredient for a painting is the board on which the work is affixed. Sometime these boards are made by the artists themselves, but it is a time consuming process and labour here is cheap. And so near the plantations of Cai Son are entrepreneurs who produce these boards en masse. Today they are normally made using plywood for a stable base which is coated with a mixture of Son gum and oil, this is then covered when hard with cloth saturated in the gum and a light silt, a further couple of layers of this mixture are added and with each layer the surface is ground flat. Making a board may be a months work, for each of the 18 steps needs a day or more to dry. Now that is according to the artists. Those more interested in a return for their labour may allow four day for making a board.

young seedlings ready to be planted out

The finished boards have surfaces exactly like glass only jet black. The cream colour seen dripping from the trees dries first to brown and then to black due to contact with the air. The boards are then sold in the same villages for about 30p for a square foot. If they are taken to Ha Hoi they will fetch 5 times as much.

Given these two key items: gum and board there are then many materials available which can be employed to produce the required colours and patterning. Two of these are of particular interest. The most typical and seeming eccentric way of obtaining a light surface is with the use of minute particles of egg shells. To get a range of colours a variety of breeds of birds unwittingly contribute their eggs. The surface on which these are to be placed is first reduced by the thickness of the shell with a scraping knife. The area is then covered with a layer of gum and the small shell pieces embedded while it is wet, rather like laying a mosaic in cement. Once in place the pieces are broken further to make sure the surface of the whole is absolutely flat and to produce the fascinating crazed surface that can be seen in many lacquer paintings. The other material used in lacquer work will already to be known to you.

A grove of Cai Son, the trees are already old enough to produce the gum

For the wonderful beauty of the mother of pearl furniture has reached our shores, a beauty gained from setting polished mother of pearl against black and lacquering the composition. But that technique too is used by fine artists. While eggshells are broken down to tiny fragments of nearly random form, mother of pearl (the inside of the shells of oysters and other molluscs) is cut to exact shapes with the finest imaginable coping-saw blade. The pieces are then in-set on the art work in a similar manner to the eggshell. They are also often used to form Chinese characters in a work where the painting of a brush would be inappropriate.

So much for some of the techniques used in producing these lacquer paintings. Now I hope you will seek them out and experience for yourselves the unique depth and intensity of colour that they bring to their subjects.

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