In a world where everything changes, arises and passes away, the painter Lê Mạnh Hùng — known as Chân Như — asks a question that sounds like a paradox: what can exist beyond arising and passing?
From that question, “Permanence” took shape as a journey in painting toward what the eye does not easily see. The moon and the sun appear across many of the works as images the painter “borrows” to point toward a presence more enduring than time — toward something behind the movements of life that is not lost.
The exhibition brings together nearly fifty new meditative works by Chân Như in oil and in lacquer, alongside two students close to his practice and to what he passes on: Định Tâm (Phan Nha Trang) and Lê Hồng Giang.
From “Khoảnh khắc” to “Permanence”
Six years ago Chân Như held an exhibition called “Khoảnh khắc” (Moment). Where it turned its attention to what happens inside a brief point in time, “Permanence” seems to open the question from the other direction: after the moments that keep changing, what remains?
In the works shown here, the sun and the moon become the central figures. For Chân Như, though, they are not the final answer to what “permanence” means. He is the first to say that the sun and the moon are themselves phenomena inside the world of change and decay. He only “borrows” them as images enduring enough to point toward something outside the cycle of arising and passing.
“I borrow these two images to speak of what is never lost and never destroyed — what is always there, however much everything changes, arises and passes.”
Behind a world in motion from moment to moment, as the painter sees it, there may still be what neither arises nor passes. That is where “Permanence” rests its thinking: not seeking the unchanging in outward form, but turning the viewer toward another depth of existence, where feeling is met whole in the present.
Meditative painting in the light of stillness and clarity: Thangka rendered on Vietnamese lacquer
One of the most striking things in Chân Như’s practice is how he understands meditative painting.
Where it is commonly pictured through lotus flowers, temples and the familiar symbols of Buddhism, his painting widens the term to many images of ordinary life.
For him the question is not what is painted, but how the artist looks at and takes in what is happening. Meditation, he holds, is the capacity to receive what is present truthfully, from a mind that is still and clear. Meditative painting therefore need not follow a set of images or a fixed system of symbols. When the mind is not governed by preconception, life appears as it is, and the artist can receive and reflect it exactly so.
“Permanence” marks a bold opening in contemporary art: for the first time, the sacred art of Thangka is rendered in traditional Vietnamese lacquer, by a meditative painter who has practised for many years.
Thangka is an exacting form, demanding precision, gravity and a high spiritual charge. Meeting the depth, the strangeness and the sheen of Vietnamese lacquer, every note of colour and every leaf of metal does more than reproduce a spiritual world — it holds the whole of the artist’s meditative energy, his stillness and his inward understanding. This is not an experiment in material alone but a meeting of culture and spirit that has no precedent on a lacquer surface.
Lacquer painted with ten fingertips: a first in the art of lacquer
“Permanence” shows work in oil and in lacquer — two materials whose working rhythms are almost opposite.
Oil lets a painter seize a moment; lacquer obliges him to live with that moment far longer. Carrying forward his own direct way of working, Chân Như paints lacquer with his ten fingertips — a method without precedent in Vietnamese lacquer painting.
No brush, no instrument standing between hand and surface: each touch and each stroke of the ten fingertips carries the pulse of feeling, the energy of meditation and the tremor of that instant straight into the lacquer. The hardest part of painting lacquer by finger is holding the feeling continuous through a process of many slow stages. Every coat, every sanding, every layer of translucent amber lacquer, every detail leafed in gold or silver can raise a new tremor — and that same richness can turn the work to chaos if the first feeling is not carried through from beginning to end.
So the making of lacquer becomes a practice of concentration in itself. The painter must nourish feeling without letting it scatter; must let the material keep offering inspiration without losing the direction he set out with. For Chân Như that too is a way of holding steady in feeling and in awareness. Technique here becomes one with a state of mind, and to make an image that lasts, the painter has to learn to pass through time without losing the tremor he began with.
What finally matters, he says, is not the material but the tremor. A brick, a piece of wood, a scrap of cloth — any material can become a means of art if the artist has love, sensitivity and skill enough to make it move. That is why setting oil beside lacquer in “Permanence” carries meaning. The two hold different rhythms of time and reach for the same end: to carry the artist’s state and feeling before what is boundless, without beginning or end.
In a short span Chân Như completed nearly fifty new meditative works across the two materials, close to twenty of them in lacquer within three months. They continue the journey he opened with “Khoảnh khắc” (Moment) in 2020.
A teacher, and the students who continue
Alongside Chân Như’s own paintings, “Permanence” shows work by Định Tâm (Phan Nha Trang) and Lê Hồng Giang — two students who each came to art by a different road before practising alongside him.
Their presence does more than widen the exhibition. It gives the word “permanence” another layer: continuation.
If a work is the trace of a moment, then art passing from one person to another makes a current longer than any single life. What is handed on there is not technique or the handling of material alone, but a way of looking at and receiving the world from the stillness that meditative painting asks for.
In a world driven ever harder by speed, “Permanence” chooses another rhythm: sitting with something, watching, feeling, and letting an image slowly appear. It is the rhythm of lacquer, where nothing can be finished in haste, and of meditative painting, where what matters is not the subject described but the state of the one who is looking.
The exhibition therefore offers no closed definition of “permanence”. It invites the viewer into a silence of their own, and to ask again what it is that exists around them.
Everything seems to arise and pass in every moment. But behind that current, is something still there?
With “Permanence”, the answer is not entirely on the surface of the paintings. Perhaps it lies in the silence a viewer makes while standing before each one.