Permanence

From “Khoảnh khắc” to “Permanence”

Where “Khoảnh khắc” — Moment — turned its attention in 2020 to what happens inside a brief point in time, “Permanence” opens the question from the opposite direction: behind that ceaseless current of change, what remains?

Across nearly fifty new works in lacquer and in oil, the sun and the moon become the central visual figures. Chân Như does not offer them as an answer to what is unchanging, however. In the end the sun and the moon belong to the world of decay as well. The painter only “borrows” those enduring images from nature to point toward something that genuinely stands outside the cycle of arising and passing.

“I borrow these two images to speak of what is never lost and never destroyed. It is always there, however much everything around it changes.”

Meditative painting in the light of stillness and clarity

Meditative painting is commonly pictured through lotus flowers, temple roofs and the familiar symbols of Buddhism. Chân Như widens the term to every expression of ordinary life. For him the question is not what is painted, but how the artist looks at the world and takes it in.

Meditation, as he understands it, is the capacity to receive what is present truthfully, from a mind that is still and clear. When the mind is not governed by preconception, life appears as it is, and the artist reflects it exactly so.

Two firsts at “Permanence”

01Thangka rendered on Vietnamese lacquer

For the first time in contemporary art, the sacred art of Thangka is rendered in traditional Vietnamese lacquer, through the inward understanding of a painter who has practised meditation deeply for many years. This is not the copying of a decorative form: every note of colour, every leaf of metal here holds the whole of the artist’s stillness and of what he has come to know.

02Lacquer painted with ten fingertips

Chân Như works the lacquer directly with his ten fingertips — no brush, no intermediate sketch. Each touch and each stroke carries the pulse of feeling and the energy of that instant straight into the material. Lacquer is made through many slow and demanding stages, and that long process becomes a practice of concentration in its own right.

A teacher, and what continues

Alongside Chân Như’s own paintings, “Permanence” gives room to the work of Định Tâm (Phan Nha Trang) and Lê Hồng Giang — two students who each came to art by their own road before practising alongside him.

The presence of the two younger artists opens another layer in the word “permanence”: continuation.

01Định Tâm (Phan Nha Trang)

She came back from the creative exhaustion that followed years of working independently. Nearly a decade of studying meditation and living simply alongside Chân Như returned her to a clear source. Here she brings small Thangka works and her first pieces in lacquer — the mark of a mind that has found its stillness.

02Lê Hồng Giang

An architect, painter and ceramic artist, and both a student and the son of Chân Như, Giang took from his father not technique alone but a way of seeing: architecture through feeling, painting through the mind, and material through the story held inside it.

Continuation here is not repetition or copying. It is keeping a current of art and of awareness alive through time.