Nature is Home

12 Dec 2025 – 12 Jan 2026
Hanoi Studio Gallery
23-25 Mạc Đĩnh Chi, Trúc Bạch, Ba Đình, Hà Nội

From the organizer:

Nguyen Tran Cuong leads us into his lacquered landscape through subtle layers of emotion.
Lacquer – rooted in the rationality and profound sensibility of Eastern aesthetics – is respected and explored by Nguyen Tran Cuong in a way that is both traditional and transformative at its highest refinement. When the labor of making disappears, when there is no longer the urge to demonstrate or overstate the material, lacquer and burnishing simply unfold on their own – seductive and natural – as if whispering Cuong’s quiet confessions.

In this latest collection, he does not hesitate to replace the familiar palette of vermilion and black with a deep spectrum of greens – a color of depth and stillness.
We step into a garden.
Layers of canopies unfold; low and tall foliage flickering in and out of sight. Golden sunlight glides across leaf tips, shimmering as it shifts. We follow him to watch the mountains turn toward a new season.
Our eyes are indulged by the richness of green and the subtle transitions within it, balanced by the soft presence of eggshell white.
Nature begins with seeing.
“To touch” the moisture of a changing season.
“To touch” the drifting breeze across the canopy.
“To touch” the light that reveals all things.
And then, we “touch” his nature.

There is a nature that feels like a quiet garden gently stirring beneath layers of moss and bricks, where tiny living beings hide.
They nest, concealed beneath the polished layers – emerging only after each stratum of lacquer is carefully revealed.
A journey from the very real to the shifting and the wondrous, like uncovering layers of memory, the sediments of time.
And in the end, we feel the contours – the subtle presence – of Nguyen Tran Cuong’s self, both hidden and revealed beneath his layers of burnishing.
Silence is his nature.
He withdraws into the green garden
In the inner landscape where he listens and converses with himself each day.
Quiet conversations that allow us to
“See”
“Touch”
“Feel”
the beauty of the everyday – the beauty of Nature as Home, the place where we take refuge, and the beauty of Nguyen Tran Cuong’s lacquered nature.

With over twenty-five years of lacquer practice, Nguyen Tran Cuong has shaped an expressive, unmistakably personal lacquer language – one that continues the lineage of his predecessors while contributing a contemporary voice to lacquer art today.