Lacquer
A short history of a slow material, the trees it comes from, and how Vietnam turned it into a way of painting
Lacquer starts as tree sap. You cut into the bark of certain trees, a grey resin bleeds out, and once it cures it becomes one of the toughest natural coatings we know: waterproof, resistant to acid and heat, and capable of a black with real depth to it. People have worked with it for something like eight thousand years, and most of that history is a record of the different things they found to do with an awkward material.
The dates are not guesswork. In Zhejiang, in eastern China, archaeologists have found lacquered wooden objects going back roughly 6,000 to 8,000 years, among them a red bowl from the Hemudu culture and a lacquered bow from the nearby Kuahuqiao site. Japan has a competing claim: lacquered burial ornaments from the early Jōmon period, found at Kakinoshima in Hokkaidō and dated to the ninth millennium BCE, along with a lacquer tree dated to around 12,600 years ago. Which came first is still argued over. What is clear is that the material is very old, and that people have always been willing to spend a great deal of time on it.
The trees
There is no single lacquer tree. There are several, all in the cashew family, and the differences between their sap are part of why the regional styles diverged the way they did.
The best known is Toxicodendron vernicifluum, the Chinese or Japanese lacquer tree, native to China and grown across China, Korea and Japan. It reaches about 20 metres, and it is tapped much the way rubber is: a cut in the bark, then a slow collection of sap across the season. The reactive compound is urushiol, and the tree gives the whole East Asian tradition its name, since urushi is simply the Japanese word for it. Urushiol is also the reason raw lacquer has to be handled with care. It belongs to the same chemical family as the irritant in poison ivy and can cause serious skin reactions. Workers build up a tolerance over years; people new to it usually have not.
Vietnam uses a relative, Toxicodendron succedaneum, or cây sơn. Its sap runs on laccol rather than urushiol, and the best of it comes from Phú Thọ province in the north. Taiwan works with the same species. The chemistry shows up in practice: laccol cures a little differently, which is part of why Vietnamese workshops built their own methods rather than importing Chinese or Japanese ones wholesale.
In Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos the tree changes again, to Gluta usitata (older texts call it Melanorrhoea usitata), the source of Burmese lacquer, or thitsi. Its compound is thitsiol. Burmese pieces are usually built over cores of coiled, split bamboo, light and springy enough that a well-made betel box can be pressed out of round and spring back, then finished with the incised yun work associated with Bagan.
The three lacquer trees, their regions, and the compound in each one's sap. Photographs via Wikimedia Commons (credit under each image).
What different places did with it
The same difficult sap produced very different traditions.
In China the instinct was to build lacquer up and then carve it. The signature technique is carved lacquer: dozens, sometimes hundreds, of thin coats laid down over months until the surface is thick enough to cut in relief, usually in a deep cinnabar red. Chinese workshops also refined inlay and qiangjin, fine engraved lines packed with gold. Lacquer here sits closer to a material for sculpture than to a coating.
Japan went the other way, treating the surface as a ground for drawing in metal. Its defining technique is maki-e, or “sprinkled picture”: a design painted in wet lacquer, then dusted with gold or silver powder before it sets. Its great practitioners, Ogata Kōrin in the late seventeenth century and Shibata Zeshin in the nineteenth, drew extraordinary refinement out of it. Zeshin was known for working other substances into his lacquer to imitate the look of iron or aged bronze.
Korea's tradition is bound up with mother-of-pearl. Najeonchilgi sets cut iridescent shell into black lacquer, and has been prized since the Goryeo dynasty. In Burma and Thailand the work runs toward incised decoration on those light bamboo-cored vessels, and toward gilded lacquer (shwezawa) on temple fittings and manuscript chests.
These are broad strokes, and the traditions borrowed from each other constantly. Still, the pattern holds: what a culture does with lacquer follows from the material in front of it and its own habits of taste. Vietnam is the interesting outlier, because there lacquer eventually stopped decorating objects and started making pictures.
Vietnam: from coating to painting
For most of its history, Vietnamese lacquer — sơn ta, “our lacquer” — did the same work it did everywhere else. It sealed and coated temple columns, altar boxes, the gilded figures in communal houses, and everyday wares. It was workshop craft, and skilled, but it was not a medium for original pictures. That changed in the twentieth century, and the change can be traced fairly precisely.
In 1925 the French painter Victor Tardieu, together with the Vietnamese artist Nam Sơn, founded the École des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine in Hanoi. The brief was to teach European methods: oil, perspective, drawing from life. The more interesting result came from another direction. Students and staff began testing whether local craft materials, silk and lacquer, could carry serious painting. Joseph Inguimberty, one of the French instructors, was taken with the lacquered surfaces on traditional objects and pushed his students to treat sơn ta as a painting medium rather than a finisher's varnish.
The name of the art form points straight at the breakthrough. Sơn mài means, roughly, lacquer (sơn) and grinding (mài), and the grinding is the part that matters.
Building it up, sanding it back
Most painting is additive. You lay down a mark, then another over it, and the image grows upward. Lacquer painting does that and then reverses it.
The artist begins with a board, traditionally wood, sealed and blackened. Onto it go coats of coloured lacquer, gold and silver leaf, and inlay, each left to cure slowly in a humid cabinet — lacquer needs moisture, not dry heat, to harden — and each one sanded flat before the next. A finished piece can carry ten layers or more, with most of the colour buried and out of sight.
Then the artist sands back into it. Using fine abrasives, and in the old workshops a paste of charcoal and human hair, they grind down through the strata until the buried colours come up where they are wanted. The picture is less painted on than uncovered. Because you cannot fully see the colours until they surface, there is a real element of chance in the process, and the better painters learned to use it. A final hand polish raises the deep wet shine, which is the cured lacquer itself and not a varnish laid over it.
Two materials became signatures of the form because they solved specific problems. Lacquer has almost no true white, so artists crushed and inlaid duck eggshell (vỏ trứng) in its place; laid in fragments, it also breaks into a fine natural craquelure. Gold and silver leaf, sealed under translucent lacquer, give the interior glow that makes the best sơn mài paintings look lit from within.
How a sơn mài surface is built and then ground back to reveal the buried colour.
The pioneers of the Indochine era
The first generation to work this way, through the 1930s and early 1940s, more or less built a national art form inside about fifteen years.
Phạm Hậu is one figure who anchors the period. He brought a high decorative polish to the medium, in folding screens of landscape and birds that still set a benchmark for finish, and he was among the artists who treated lacquer as a serious picture-making surface rather than a craft finish.
Much of the early momentum owed to Alix Aymé (1894–1989), one of the few women teaching at the École and the French instructor who took lacquer up as a working medium rather than only admiring it. She learned the craft properly, from Vietnamese master artisans — the lacquer specialist Đinh Văn Thành is the name that recurs — and from the craft villages themselves, and she is widely credited with helping relaunch lacquer as a fine-art medium. Her own manner, flattened and decorative, came out of the Nabis and Maurice Denis. It is worth being precise about credit here: the emergence of sơn mài was a three-way effort between the French teachers, their Vietnamese students, and the craftsmen who actually held the technical knowledge.
The dominant figure is Nguyễn Gia Trí (1908–1993), often called the king of lacquer painting. His contribution was less a new technique than a larger ambition for the material. He wanted lacquer to do what oil could — depth, modelling, a full range of colour, figures that sit in space — without losing the glow only lacquer has. He worked hard on pigments, coaxed new colours out of a limited palette, and used eggshell as a deliberate white, sometimes tinted, sometimes left to craze. His large screens of women in gardens, worked in gold and red and shadow, are the pictures most often cited as proof that sơn mài belongs with fine art rather than craft.
The context is worth stating plainly. All of this happened inside a colonial institution, run and funded by the French, and Inguimberty's encouragement, real as it was, came from within that system. What the Vietnamese artists made of it is the reason the period still holds up. They took an imported fine-art framework, turned it back onto their own material, and produced something neither French nor traditional but modern and distinctly Vietnamese.
The material travels west
Lacquer moved in the other direction too. In 1912 the Swiss-French metalworker Jean Dunand (1877–1942) learned Japanese lacquer from the master Seizo Sugawara, trading his own knowledge of metalwork for a short, intense apprenticeship in urushi. Dunand went on to become the defining lacquer artist of Art Deco: screens, furniture, portraits, and, in 1934, the vast lacquered panels for the smoking room of the ocean liner Normandie.
His connection to Vietnam runs deeper than style. Dunand sourced much of his lacquer from Indochina and ran his Paris atelier largely on Vietnamese craftsmen, many from traditional lacquer regions, in part because they carried a tolerance for urushi that most Europeans lacked. At the height of the Normandie commission he had around a hundred people working for him. The shape of it is familiar from the École: a single European name on the finished work, and a workshop of Vietnamese hands, mostly unrecorded, who actually knew the material.
A slow medium
The common thread across all of it is time. A carved Chinese box is months of layering before anyone makes the first cut. A sơn mài painting is weeks of building, curing and sanding before the image even starts to appear, and more sanding after that to find it. Lacquer sets on its own schedule and does not reward hurry. That slowness is not incidental to the work. It is most of what the work is.
Sources & further reading
• Lacquer tree species and chemistry: Britannica, “Lacquer tree (Toxicodendron vernicifluum)”; Wikipedia, “Toxicodendron vernicifluum,” “Toxicodendron succedaneum,” “Gluta usitata.”
• Comparative chemistry (urushiol / laccol / thitsiol): “Quantitative Detection of Thitsiol and Urushiol as Markers from the Gluta usitata Lacquer Tree Using HPLC,” Molecules (MDPI), 2024; “The chemical analysis of Southeast Asian lacquers collected from forests and workshops in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar,” ScienceDirect.
• Early history and origins: Wikipedia, “Lacquerware”; “8,000-Year-Old Lacquerware Dug Up in Eastern China,” Ancient Origins; “Japan: The Earliest Evidence of Complex Technology for Creating Durable Coloured Goods” (ResearchGate).
• Japanese and Chinese techniques (maki-e, carved lacquer, Kōrin, Zeshin): Britannica, “Lacquerwork — Japan”; Wikipedia, “Maki-e,” “Japanese lacquerware,” “Chinese lacquerware.”
• Burmese technique (yun, shwezawa, Bagan): npj Heritage Science, “The evolution of the materials used in the yun technique”; “Shwe Zawa” and V&A Museum lacquer collection overviews.
• Vietnamese sơn mài technique and history: Wikipedia, “Lacquer painting”; “Vietnamese Lacquer Painting: Materiality & History,” National Gallery Singapore; “A technical analysis of paint media used in twentieth-century Vietnamese lacquer paintings,” Studies in Conservation (Taylor & Francis), 2016.
• École des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine and the pioneers: “École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine” and “Nguyen Gia Tri (1908–1993),” Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism; “The Groundbreaking Work of L'École des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine Artists,” Saigoneer.
• Alix Aymé and lacquer teaching: “Alix Aymé,” Wikipedia; Quang San Art Museum artist page; “The Revival of Vietnamese Lacquer in the 20th Century,” Society of Friends of the Cernuschi Museum.
• Jean Dunand: “How Jean Dunand Made Lacquer the Jewel of Art Deco Design,” TEFAF; “Jean Dunand,” Wikipedia; “Comprehensive Multi-Analytical Investigations on the Vietnamese Lacquered Wall-Panel ‘The Return of the Hunters’ by Jean Dunand,” Scientific Reports (Nature), 2019.
• Plant photographs: Wikimedia Commons — Toxicodendron vernicifluum (Aomorikuma), Toxicodendron succedaneum, and Gluta usitata. Confirm each photographer credit and licence on the file page before any public use.
Note on one open question: scholars disagree about whether the earliest lacquer use belongs to China (Kuahuqiao / Hemudu, c. 6,000–8,000 years ago) or Japan (Jōmon-period finds). Both claims are given here rather than settling a dispute the current evidence does not settle. The cross-section is an original diagram made for this piece; the three plant photographs are from Wikimedia Commons under their respective open licences, credited beneath each image.