When I was a 10-year-old boy, I was always overwhelmed by a field immersed in the golden twilight. That image is obsessive, creating the aesthetic perspective that I desire to achieve—a beauty of stillness but also in chaos. To express the beauty of that memory for the collection, “La Moyenne Région”—a lacquer painting by two artists, Nguyen Tien Chung and Hoang Tich Chu—depicts a Vietnam that no longer exists. I would love to convey the perspective of fields that no longer exist that are not only simple and rustic but also extremely splendid, luxurious, flashy, and overwhelming. The painting, done with typical Vietnamese lacquer techniques, depicts a field submerged in a beautiful sunset. Exploiting the painting for the collection from a wide angle to the most detailed, from the clear sky to the twilight sunset. The collection utilized sophisticated techniques and feats such as 3D bonding in order to create the roughness of the rocky massifs. The surface of the fabric material undergoes encrustation, stamping, and pressing like a rough gold piece of lacquer. Each feather is inlaid with gold, the branches of young rice, crops, and meticulously hand-made vines; or the painting of rice fields is covered with more than 14 types of fabric and 20 kinds of lines… All these feats are meant to portray a peaceful and prosperous Vietnam.
