ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Chân Như’s road to meditative painting began with a love of drawing he had as a child. Born and raised in Nam Định, he was absorbed in it by the age of five or six. That unforced delight grew with the years into a steady devotion, carrying him to the University of Industrial Fine Arts and afterwards to a post teaching fine art at the College of Arts and Crafts under the Ministry of Construction.

A chance turn at work opened another direction. Assigned to build a curriculum on Vietnamese Buddhist statuary, he began using every spare hour to visit temples large and small around Hà Nội, to look and to study. Out of those journeys an interest in Buddhist art led him toward deeper questions about the inner life, and the idea of meditative painting slowly took shape in him. Since then, alongside his study of painting, he has read across the schools of meditation and practised it, finding step by step a harmony between meditative discipline and the means of painting.

For nearly two decades Chân Như has pursued meditative painting — a way of working that puts little weight on describing the outer world, and reaches instead to record the fine movements of the inner one: the artist’s tremor before life, and the transformations that come through practice. For him a painting does not begin from a calculated idea but from stillness; it is not necessarily built on a composition settled in advance, but forms out of the painter’s wholly present state.

One of the most singular things in his work is that he paints directly with his ten fingertips, in oil and in lacquer alike. No brush, no sketch, no composition prepared in the ordinary way: each movement of the hand and each layer of colour is set down as a natural flow of feeling and intuition.

A work is usually finished in thirty to ninety minutes. Behind that short span, though, lie years of practice, observation, reflection and self-transformation. He has now made more than five hundred meditative works. Each is the mark of a state of mind, a whole in which content and form, feeling and intuition hold together — carrying the spirit of its subject and a living energy of its own. Because each is made directly by ten fingertips in a moment that cannot be repeated, every one of them is singular.

That journey is marked by a number of exhibitions:

1. 2020 – Solo exhibition of meditative painting, “Khoảnh Khắc” (Moment), Hà Nội
2. 2015 – Solo exhibition of meditative painting, “Sen – Cha và con” (Lotus — Father and Son), Hà Nội
3. 2013 – Group exhibition, “Quê hương” (Homeland), Hà Nội and Quảng Bình
4. 2011 – Solo exhibition of meditative painting, “Bến đợi” (The Waiting Shore), Hà Nội
5. 2008 – Solo exhibition of meditative painting, “Về thôi” (Coming Home), Hà Nội
6. 2006 – Group exhibition, “Hồn quê Việt” (The Spirit of the Vietnamese Countryside), Hà Nội

Định Tâm (Phan Nha Trang) began studying with Chân Như in 2017. Nearly ten years, with their ups and downs — not a long road, but long enough for her to recognise where she truly belongs.

What brought her to him did not begin with painting but with troubled questions about life and the world. He answered them to their end, and showed her how to live wholly in each moment she is present for. From there her once small world opened without limit, full of what is true, new and moving.

Before meeting Chân Như she had worked across photography, graphic design and independent film. Each road brought a measure of success, and behind each lay limits that seemed impossible to pass. The stories of yesterday slowly stopped moving her. She searched on until the source within her felt dry, her mind circling, nothing left inside but stones — a state close to despair for anyone who makes art.

But the meeting with Chân Như opened an entirely different journey.

Định Tâm never trained in fine art; all she had was an instinct for drawing, seeded in childhood while she watched her mother’s embroidery. Through nearly ten years of study, Chân Như never taught her painting technique in the ordinary sense.

She went with her teacher and the others to the midlands to build a small garden of medicinal plants. From a city woman with some reputation she became nobody, learning the plain things again from the beginning: cooking, gardening, caring for the animals around her, and on to mending the water and the wiring, fitting the track on a digger.

Through it, Chân Như taught her to be wholly present in each step she took, each task she did, each person she met. The rust inside her fell away, returning her to who she was. She began to open to the world and to the minds of the people around her.

Her capacity to be moved came back, direct and strong, before the four seasons, the earth and sky, the living things, the grass and trees. She was full of stories to tell and of a childlike feeling she had thought long gone.

Through all of it Chân Như was present like an old tree throwing shade. What struck her most about her teacher was his plainness — doing everything with his own hands however hard it was — together with a capacity to observe, to recognise and to act at once on what is here, without holding fast to any assumption.

Helping him work, Định Tâm saw that his paintings never had a settled outcome, but danced freely with each unrepeatable tremor, drawing on the whole of a practised technique to express something unchanging and permanent.

Six years ago, at “Khoảnh khắc” (2020), her teacher gave her a small corner to show naive paintings of the cats and dogs in the garden and of herself as a child.

Six years on, returning with “Permanence”, she enters a new space of making, confident and unhesitating. This time she brings small Thangka works and her first pieces in lacquer — made out of reverence, respect and deep gratitude after nearly ten years of practice.

Each painting is a remarkable break for her, past limits she had thought permanent. In every stroke of Định Tâm’s there is her teacher’s careful guidance, and childhood memory, and the smell of ripe fruit, an open smile, good things handed on, and love for those who have gone.

She paints with the whole of herself, holding nothing back, the way her teacher has always lived.

And so Định Tâm returns to the source — where her heart is light and at peace, and where a warm moon of wisdom shines, always there.

Lê Hồng Giang is an architect, a painter and a ceramic artist, and both a student and the son of Chân Như. For Giang the story of continuation begins in his earliest years, when art was simply present in the space the family lived in.

From childhood he watched his father work on buildings, paint pictures, make ceramic works. He did not only watch: his father let him try, let him do, let him touch the materials and share in the making of a piece. At first those may have been no more than a child’s moments beside his father. But over the years the colour, the form, the line, the material, the light and a way of seeing space soaked into his mind.

No lesson was handed down as a curriculum. Some lessons pass through watching, through the hands, and through years lived alongside art. From his father, Giang received more than a trade. He received a way of seeing: to look at a building not by its function alone but by feeling; at a painting not by its colour alone but by the mind; at a material not by its shape alone but by the story held inside it.

That inheritance carried on through several fields of making. Architecture gave Giang a feel for space, proportion, structure and use. Fine art gave him a way of watching the world through colour, line, light and feeling. Ceramics returned him to earth, water, mineral and fire — where the artist does not wholly master the material but must listen, wait, and hold a conversation with nature.

Alongside painting, Giang practises meditation and now works in ceramics. For him architecture, painting and ceramics are different languages for expressing a world he feels from within. What he sees, touches and lives through does not stop at that moment; it is held in the mind, and over time turns into new thought, feeling and perspective.

But continuation does not mean repetition. From what was handed to him, Giang goes on learning, testing and searching for expression of his own. What he received from his father and teacher has not become a mould to copy, but seeds that go on being nourished by nature, by life and by his own experience. If Chân Như gave Giang the first seeds of art, Giang’s own life is bringing them into a different flowering.

And perhaps that is the deeper meaning of inheritance: not holding a form unchanged, but keeping a current alive. From father to son. From teacher to student. From the eye to the hand. From material to work. From life to the mind. That is the current Lê Hồng Giang is carrying forward on a road of his own.