Lý Trực Sơn

Born in 1949 in Thừa Thiên Huế, Vietnam, Lý Trực Sơn belongs to the generation of Vietnamese artists who received academic art training during the wartime period, matured professionally after 1975, and contributed significantly to the renewal of Vietnamese painting. Rather than developing along a single, fixed stylistic trajectory, his practice has continually shifted across different materials, from watercolor on dó paper and traditional lacquer to pigments extracted from plants and abstract painting made with earth, stone, sand, ash, and minerals. Underlying these transitions is a sustained effort to construct a visual language that remains rooted in Vietnamese cultural experience while engaging with modern and contemporary international art and thought.

Lý Trực Sơn’s path toward painting began in 1961, when he took part in an artistic talent selection held in the Vĩnh Linh area. Before the age of twelve, he was admitted to the preparatory and intermediate program of the Vietnam College of Fine Arts, now the Vietnam University of Fine Arts. There, he received early training in drawing, composition, color, and artistic techniques under such artists as Giáng Hương, Hoàng Đạo Khánh, and Đinh Trọng Khang. Alongside painting, his study of classical music appreciation with Nguyễn Văn Quỳ helped shape an artistic outlook that placed particular emphasis on rhythm, chromatic harmony, structure, and the direct sensory effects of form.

After completing the intermediate program in the late 1960s, Lý Trực Sơn was invited to remain at the school as a young instructor when he was around twenty years old. In 1971, he entered the university-level program, but his studies were interrupted when he volunteered for military service during the war. He returned to the school in 1976, combining his studies with teaching assistance, and graduated in 1979. For nearly a decade afterward, he taught at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, where he became particularly involved with lacquer painting.

His years of training and teaching provided him with a rigorous professional foundation, encompassing an understanding of materials and technical processes as well as the organization of form and pictorial surfaces. Technique, however, was never an end in itself. Lý Trực Sơn has emphasized that the apparent freedom of a painting must be grounded in an “iron discipline,” developed through repeated acts of painting, correction, erasure, and reconstruction. This belief became fundamental to his long-term artistic inquiry: intuition could achieve genuine power only when supported by technical knowledge and strict control over materials.

In the early 1980s, Lý Trực Sơn attracted attention with the series Wild Clouds, executed in watercolor on dó paper. These works were connected to the landscapes and rural life of the northern Vietnamese delta, yet they went beyond the direct recording of scenery. On the thin, absorbent surface of dó paper, observed forms were simplified, softened, and reorganized into distinctive rhythms of color. Village gates, fields, old architecture, clothing, pottery, and traces of folk culture gradually became a repository of visual memory that the artist would continue to transform throughout his later practice.

At a time when Vietnamese painting remained strongly influenced by realist modes of representation, Lý Trực Sơn’s simplification of form and emphasis on perceptual structure signaled an emerging transformation. The village in his paintings was not merely a subject. It also functioned as a source of rhythms, tonal relationships, and cultural signs that could be restructured into a modern visual language.

In 1989, Lý Trực Sơn traveled to France to study at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, beginning nearly a decade of studying, living, and working in France and Germany. By that time, he had already spent many years as both a student and teacher of art, and his main concern was no longer simply the acquisition of new techniques. He sought to understand why European art was capable of continual transformation, what conditions brought an artwork into existence, and what intellectual foundations lay behind different artistic forms.

His study of pre-Renaissance art, his encounters with modern artistic concepts, and his direct observation of European cultural life gradually shifted his attention from the question of “how to paint” toward the more fundamental question of “why one must paint.” Painting came to be understood as a process of self-reflection in which spiritual experience, material structure, and the artist’s individual consciousness were inseparable.

His years in Europe also marked the beginning of his experiments with natural pigments. After using strongly brewed tea on dó paper and observing the durability of its dark brown tone, he began to investigate colors derived from plants and materials associated with everyday local life. His European experience did not lead him to adopt a particular Western school or abandon his cultural foundations. Instead, it clarified the need to develop a personal language in which Eastern and Western experiences could be absorbed and transformed rather than superficially combined.

After returning to Vietnam in 1998, Lý Trực Sơn devoted approximately ten years to lacquer painting. He revisited the legacy of the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine and the techniques of Vietnamese lacquer not in order to restore a historical style, but to pursue possibilities within Vietnamese lacquer that remained unresolved. He approached the medium through a perspective expanded by his years in Europe.

A major achievement of this period was the solo exhibition This Place, held in Hanoi in 2009. In the series, memories of the Dâm Đàm legend, brown monastic clothing, folk games, Lý–Trần dynasty ceramics, donor statues from Bút Tháp Pagoda, and the architectural environment of Dâu Pagoda were condensed into forms, color fields, and symbolic signs. Traditional cultural elements were not treated as decorative motifs or illustrative references but became active components of the works’ internal structures. This Place therefore represented both a return to cultural origins and a demonstration of how lacquer could be modernized from within its own materials and history.

Following the success of This Place, Lý Trực Sơn chose not to repeat the formula that had already earned him recognition. A journey to the Trường Sa archipelago in 2010 resulted in nearly twenty works on dó paper depicting the people and everyday life of the islands. These were subsequently presented in the exhibition Not Uninvolved and Ballad of the East Sea, held with sculptor Đào Châu Hải. The project brought together contemporary experience, wartime memory, and the search for a new means of expression. From this point onward, he gradually moved away from lacquer, returned to dó paper, and further developed the experiments with natural pigments that he had begun in France.

At his studio on the outskirts of Hanoi, Lý Trực Sơn organized his creative process as something between a laboratory and a garden. He studied the traditions of fabric dyeing, papermaking, and natural color production practiced by ethnic communities and craft villages. He brought plants back to his studio, cultivated them, and processed their roots, leaves, and flowers by drying, grinding, or boiling them into concentrated pigments. Among the materials he experimented with were yam roots, black turmeric, mugwort, butterfly pea flowers, and magenta plant leaves.

Natural pigments vary in stability and often interact in unpredictable ways. The artist must therefore combine knowledge and intuition with an acceptance of chance. Dó paper is no longer simply a support for an image but becomes a material body that absorbs, disperses, and transforms color while retaining traces of water, light, time, and the movements of the artist’s hand.

From around 2013, Lý Trực Sơn made a decisive turn toward abstract lacquer painting. He deliberately restrained the familiar visual attractions of lacquer—such as gold, silver, vermilion, and highly polished surfaces—and instead investigated fields of blue, black, and white, together with deep, subdued surfaces containing few descriptive elements. Curves, circles, character-like structures, and forms derived from Lý–Trần ceramics entered his paintings but no longer represented historical artifacts directly. They became signals suspended between writing, image, and rhythm, evoking an indeterminate spiritual space.

Between 2013 and 2018, he co-founded and actively participated in the Sơn Ta Group, which brought together professional lacquer artists working in northern Vietnam. The group sought to preserve and develop Vietnamese lacquer as an independent visual language. It continued the achievements associated with the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine without restricting the medium to the conventions established during the twentieth century. Through these activities, Lý Trực Sơn emerged not only as an artist but also as an important contributor to professional discussions concerning the future of Vietnamese lacquer.

Although he had established a distinctive personal language in lacquer and on dó paper, Lý Trực Sơn became increasingly aware of the physical limitations of both media. Dó paper readily receives color but permits almost no erasure, while lacquer can be added, removed, or polished back, yet its lengthy drying and curing processes prevent the artist from observing the immediate consequences of each gesture. His desire for a more direct mode of working led him toward charcoal, ash, brick, earth, stone, sand, and raw mineral pigments.

With these materials, painting became increasingly similar to plastering, layering, scraping, erasing, and constructing a surface. The transition toward earth and minerals, however, did not constitute a complete rupture with lacquer or dó paper. Instead, it extended his long-standing interest in natural materials, accumulated surfaces, and the relationship between time and the artwork. In lacquer, depth is constructed through layers of resin and processes of polishing; on dó paper, color accumulates through absorption; in the earth paintings, the history of the work becomes directly visible through rough textures, cracks, scraped marks, built-up layers, and physical weight.

In 2024, the solo exhibition ĐẤT – EARTH, held at the Vincom Center for Contemporary Art in Hanoi, marked a major turning point in Lý Trực Sơn’s career. The exhibition presented 71 works, most of which were created between late 2022 and 2024. Sixteen were large-scale paintings, each measuring up to 4.2 meters in width. The exhibition was the result of approximately ten years of material research and three years of concentrated work. Earth, gravel, stone, sand, ash, brick, plants, and inorganic pigments were combined into thick, rough, multilayered surfaces upon which minimal forms appeared like memories, traces, or signals from a primordial world.

Through ĐẤT – EARTH, Lý Trực Sơn articulated more clearly his understanding of abstraction. For him, abstraction is not simply a Western artistic movement but is connected to a fundamental human need to make marks, construct symbols, and communicate with aspects of existence that cannot be fully explained through reason. His works do not tell linear stories. Instead, they place the viewer before material substance, scale, emptiness, rhythm, and the energy of traces. Painting is therefore no longer a reproduction of nature but a new entity formed through the encounter between the artist’s body, material, and intuition.

In 2025, the exhibition Lacquer – Paper – Earth at Vin Gallery marked Lý Trực Sơn’s first solo exhibition in Ho Chi Minh City. By placing works on paper from the 1990s alongside lacquer paintings dating from around 2014 and earth paintings from the 2020s, the exhibition demonstrated that these three materials did not constitute separate chapters but formed a continuous artistic journey. Lacquer preserves time within accumulated layers; paper records absorption, lightness, and movement; earth returns painting to weight, origins, and physical presence.

In the same year, his works were featured in the exhibition Retrospect Toward the Future at VCCA, alongside those of Ca Lê Thắng and Đào Minh Tri. The exhibition situated the journeys of the three artists within the context of Vietnamese art during the Đổi Mới period and the broader effort to establish an independent Vietnamese artistic language. Lý Trực Sơn’s works are held in the collections of the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum, the National Gallery Prague, and a number of private collections in Vietnam and abroad.

Viewed as a whole, Lý Trực Sơn’s contribution lies not merely in his achievements with any single medium but in his persistent questioning of the nature of Vietnamese painting. From memories of northern villages and folk symbols to Vietnamese lacquer, dó paper, plant-based pigments, earth, stone, and minerals, he has removed local materials from their conventional illustrative functions and transformed them into vehicles of modern artistic thought.

The movement in his work from recognizable imagery toward abstract signs does not represent a rejection of the past. Rather, it is a condensation of the past through lived experience, technical knowledge, and several decades of experimentation. Lý Trực Sơn may therefore be regarded as one of the artists who have forged an important connection between the modern Vietnamese lacquer tradition, abstract painting, and contemporary material-based practices.