What would remind you of Viet Nam? The spicy seafood, the scenic natural resorts, or the Broadway hit "Miss Saigon?"

Now there may be something else, if you pay a visit to the exhibition of contemporary paintings of Viet Nam at the Art Gallery of the Capital Library in Beijing.

Jointly organized by the Ministry of Culture-Information of Viet Nam and the Ministry of Culture of China, the exhibition celebrates the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two nations.

It also rounds off the Week of Vietnamese Culture in Beijing, which also includes singing and dancing performances staged by a visiting Vietnamese delegation.

Running until Wednesday, the art show presents the audience with thick southern Asian flavors, via distinctive Vietnamese music and 45 paintings created by local artists in recent years.

All exhibits on display are said to be the artistic productions of 32 of the most well-known middle-aged and younger painters in Viet Nam.

Do Quoc Viet, a Vietnamese oil painter in his 30s, attended the exhibition's opening ceremony on September 1.

He has brought his oil painting, "Winter Is Coming," to show Beijing audiences this time.

"The painting was produced on a journey I made to several Vietnamese villages a couple of years ago. I adopted the golden yellow as the picture's dominating color, which reflected the great harvest in mountainous areas. Meanwhile I dotted it with red blushes, the outlook of the soil in Viet Nam," Do said.

"The painting feels so peaceful and warm that you hardly connect it with the chilly winter."

Oil paintings on show range from realistic themes to more abstract styles.

Lacquer paintings

Yet what attracts most attention are the 29 featured "polished lacquer paintings."

As Do Quoc Viet explained, the noted traditional Vietnamese art form of polished lacquer painting can be traced back to the French conquest of Viet Nam in the 19th century.

In the very beginning, raw lacquer was used to manufacture living and working tools. Then young students in the French-run fine art schools introduced this kind of natural material into their artistic creations, and thus developed the new art of polished lacquer painting. Thus it has a history of at least 100 years, Do said.

A high quality lacquer painting normally undergoes several instances of polishing in water before being colored.

Painters favored a reddish brown color, the appearance of most soils in the country, and used to add gold and silver into the coloring material to make the painting look even more splendid.

Yet most important, the natural lacquers typical in Viet Nam give the final works a rich yet primitive effect.

"There are a large number of artists who devote themselves to doing lacquer painting now in Viet Nam. And they have experimented a lot to give this kind of traditional art a new look in recent years," Do said.

The younger generation of artists no longer limit their creations only to the raw lacquer and conventional colors. They have brought in other materials, such as eggshell pieces.

And yet, many foreign visitors to Viet Nam still prefer the original ones. However, through these lacquer and oil paintings, audiences are able to appreciate the enormousness, purity and elegancy of the Vietnamese culture and the distinguished charms of its contemporary arts.

Other excellent artworks by promising Vietnamese artists can be seen in art galleries across the world nowadays. They make great efforts to not only increase the prosperity of Viet Nam's modern culture, but also to take a place in the world's art institutions, said Vietnamese official delegates in the dedication to the opening ceremony.

"We wish that there could be more exchanges in the art of the lacquer painting with artists from China and other countries. That would greatly help to maintain our creativity," said Do Quoc Viet.

Lacquer painting was first introduced to Chinese people in the 1960s. Since then, the Chinese Government has sent several artists to Viet Nam to learn the antique art. And they have successfully combined the skills of both lacquer painting and traditional Chinese painting, to produce excellent works that show the beauty of these two artistic languages.

(China Daily September 5, 2005)