Lady Playing a Nguyet Cam 1943 signed with artist's seal and dated 1943 ink and colour on silk laid on bristol board 73 by 61 cm. 28 6/8 by 24 in. The work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity issued by Henri Joly, dated 7 December 1943.FootnotesProvenance Galerie Henri Joly, Paris Acquired directly from the above by the previous owner before 1950 Thence by descent to the present owner Exhibited Paris, Galerie Henri Joly, Trois Peintres Indochinois, 1943. Literature Olivier Quéant, Le Confort à la Campagne, Plaisir de France, no.170, May 1952, p.42, illustrated in black and white. 枚中栨 （枚栨）/ 梅忠恕（梅恕） 彈奏月琴的女子 一九四三年作 簽名：藝術家鈐印（右下）MAI THU 1943（右下） 水墨設色絹本 來源 法國巴黎Galerie Henri Joly 前任藏家於1950前得自上述畫廊 現藏家繼承自上述來源 展覽 「Trois Peintres Indochinois」，法國巴黎 Galerie Henri Joly，1943年 出版 《Le Confort à la Campagne》，Olivier Quéant，Plaisir de France，第170版，1952年5月，第42頁，黑白圖 Mai Trung Thu, also known as Mai Thu, is widely hailed as one of the pioneers of modern Vietnamese painting. He was among the first graduating class (1925-1930) of the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine (EBAI) in colonial Hanoi. At this institute, students were encouraged by their French art instructors to experiment with Vietnamese traditional media—particularly lacquer and silk—to create artwork combining Western techniques and theories of art with local subject matter and aesthetics.1 Prior to the establishment of the EBAI, painting in Vietnam was predominantly considered a "Chinese" art form; however, the EBAI and its founder Victor Tardieu played pivotal roles in transforming lacquer and silk into modern painting materials to be used for creating fine art.2 As early as 1930, the work of the EBAI's first cohort had begun to be circulated and sold in Paris and abroad, and therefore their artwork often catered to the tastes of the métropole while striving to develop modern forms of visual expression.3 Mai Thu's style of painting is unmistakably characterised by the aforementioned eclectic and innovative approaches. Lady Playing a Nguyet Cam was acquired directly from the gallerist Henri Joly (1876-1957) in Paris by the previous owner in the 1940s. Its provenance indicates that the painting was featured together with other works by Mai Thu, Le Pho, and Vu Cao Dam in a group exhibition titled Trois Peintres Indochinois (The Three Indochinese Painters) in December 1943 at Henri Joly's gallery, formerly known as Galerie Hessel4. This may give us some insight into Mai Thu's artistic journey in Europe. Paris, the capital of the modern art world since the 19th century, attracted progressive and aspiring artists from around the world in the first half of the 20th century. Le Pho, Vu Cao Dam, and Mai Thu—later collectively known as the "Vietnamese Art Trio of Paris" 5 —also left Vietnam and settled initially in Paris during the late 1930s, hoping to grow as artists and benefit from the city's diverse arts milieu, where they could actively participate in exhibitions across various salons and galleries. Mai Thu would eventually spend more than half his lifetime in France. During his stay in Mâcon from 1940 to 1942, his work underwent a major change—he gave up oil on canvas and began to focus most of his career efforts on making exquisite paintings on silk, an exotic Asian material appealing to the metropolitan audience at the time. It should be noted that the indoor work of silk reeling and spinning, which requires a high level of skill, is traditionally performed by women in South China and Vietnam. Moreover, the unique quality of silk, such as its tactile softness and its receptivity to wet media creating subtle shades of colours, exudes a delicate sense of femininity as is evident in Lady Playing a Nguyet Cam. At the 1943 exhibition where this painting was presented, Mai Thu was referred to as an intimiste in recognition of his attempts to bring ordinary scenes from everyday life to the fore.6 The theme of female figures is notably a subject in its own right in the works by intimiste artists, as in Lady Playing a Nguyet Cam, whose primary focus is a graceful lady playing nguyet cam (also called dan nguyet), a two-stringed Vietnamese musical instrument which literally means "moon lute." In a fluid and lyrical manner, this painting not only blends sight and sound but also invites the viewer to experience an intimate and ephemeral moment captured in its pictorial space. This painting bespeaks Mai Thu's passion for music and his role as an accomplished musician. During his years at the ancient capital Hue from 1931 to 1937 as a high school art teacher, he mastered the bamboo flute (sao truc) and the monochord zither dan bau (doc huyen cam) native to Vietnam. After Mai Thu moved to France, he regularly performed in concerts and even recorded the album Musique du Viet-nam with the prominent Vietnamese musicologist Tran Van Khe. In an interview from 1967, Mai Thu confessed that he particularly enjoyed listening to traditional Vietnamese music while working on his paintings. 7 As such, he was ceaseless in his efforts to incorporate the elements of music and his ideas of artistic synthesis into his oeuvre. Mai Thu also employed Western formal techniques in the making of Lady Playing a Nguyet Cam. The composition of the painting seems to follow the Rule of Thirds; the lady musician—the main subject—is slightly pulled to the right side of the central division, while the other lady sitting with her back facing the viewer is situated on the left side to create a visual balance. Despite being the entry point of this painting, the lady musician is shown looking away from the viewer; at the same time, the gaze of the other lady and of the viewer falls on her. This dynamic gazing direction and the angles of both ladies' limbs create a fluid motion in the composition, allowing the viewer to follow the visual path designed by the artist and move freely around the picture without hesitation. Here, the lady musician's contemplative, detached gaze serves as an intriguing medium for communication between the viewer and the artwork, with a dreamy moon lute melody floating in the air. The everyday objects like the folding fan and the teacups delicately illustrated in the elegant interior setting of Lady Playing a Nguyet Cam are quintessentially reminiscent of pertinent Vietnamese cultural elements. The two young ladies are clad in soft flowing ao dai, conveying a sense of identity and modernity.8 Interestingly, the subdued jade green background and the white flowers in vase echo the title of the little red book placed on the traditional low table—Ngoc Hoa (玉花 jade flowers), the name of the female protagonist in the anonymous 18th-century epic poem Ngoc Hoa Co Tich Truyen. The poem tells a faithful love story of the beautiful and virtuous Ngoc Hoa and her husband Pham Tai. In the story, Ngoc Hoa not only keeps her chastity and saves her husband from the underworld but also goes on to denounce the crime of the king who killed her husband. Her acts celebrate and uphold the resilient and admirable qualities of people—especially women—who never surrender to violence and power.9 Mai Thu thoughtfully presented these objects in a new light and used them to reconstruct a space for self-expression and, to a certain extent, reassure the autonomy of the feminised arena of Vietnamese women's daily life. It is evident that Mai Thu's interest in music, photography, and film10 led him to create this transformative painting, which involves all senses and serves as an evocative performative site, imbued with visual metaphors transcending location and time. The power of Mai Thu's art derives from his eclectic artistic practice merging Western and Vietnamese styles with his unique visual sensibilities, demonstrating a mediation between his past training in colonial Vietnam and his artistic adventures in cosmopolitan Paris. Lady Playing a Nguyet Cam exemplifies his development as an iconic artist who opened a new chapter in Vietnam's modern art history. 1. Nora A. Taylor, Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art, 2nd ed. (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009), 34-38. According to Taylor, the legacy of the EBAI founder Victor Tardieu was encouragement of students to develop their own sense of aesthetics and not to just imitate the great European masters. 2. With the founding of the EBAI, painting in Vietnam took on a new form during the colonial period. See Nora A. Taylor, "Orientalism/Occidentalism: The Founding of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts d'Indochine and the Politics of Painting in Colonial Vietnam, 1925-1945," Crossroads 11 (2): 3. 3. Phoebe Scott, "Colonial or Cosmopolitan? Vietnamese Art in Paris in the 1930s-1940s," Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 3, no. 2 (2019): 189. 4. Henri Joly succeeded the Belgian-born art dealer Jos Hessel (1859-1942) and ran Galerie Hessel after Hessel's passing. Galerie Hessel was located at No. 26 Rue la Boétie and later known as Galerie Joly-Hessel or Galerie Henri Joly. 5. Junko Nimura, "Adoption and Development of Popular Images in Mai Thu's Paintings: A Consideration of Modern Vietnamese Genre Painting," VERBA 43 (2020): 35. 6. Ibid., 35-6. The painters of Nabi school, significantly influenced by Japanese art and design, were positioned as intimists in the 1920s. 7. Exhibition catalogue, Maï-Thu, Echo d'un Vietnam Rêvé (Mâcon, France: Musée des Ursulines, 2021): 132-8. 8. The ao dai, one of the iconic symbols of Vietnam and a newly fashioned form of traditional long tunic dress created around 1923, was often worn by elite women in French colonial Vietnam. See Taylor, Painters in Hanoi, 155. 9. Ngoc Hoa Co Tich Truyen is a vernacular Nôm narrative poem popular in both Vietnam and Thailand; the digital version of its 1871 edition published by Thinh Van Duong publishing house can be found in the Yale University Library digital collections. 10. Mai Thu filmed two documentaries: La Conférence de Fontainebleau de Ho Chi Minh (1946) recording Ho Chí Minh's visit to France and La Peinture sur Soie (1949) explaining the techniques of painting on silk. In addition, he appeared in the 1963 film Fort du Fou in which he played a Catholic priest during the Indochina War. The Maï-Thu, Echo d'un Vietnam Rêvé exhibition catalogue and Junko Nimura's research on Mai Thu both point out his penchant for cinema. 《彈奏月琴的女子》是其前藏家於1940年代直接從亨利·喬利(Henri Joly)位於巴黎的畫廊購買。資料顯示，此畫曾於1943年12月同其他作品在枚中栨和黎譜、武高談的聯展中展出。該展辦於亨利·喬利的畫廊，此畫廊前身即為巴黎藝文界相當知名的海索藝廊(Galerie Hessel)。 這些寶貴的信息有助於我們瞭解枚中栨和其他越南畫家在歐洲的創作歷程。作為19世紀以來的現代藝術之都，巴黎在20世紀上半葉吸引了世界各地才華洋溢且胸懷大志的藝術家，因此枚中栨、黎譜與武高談在1930年代末也離開越南家鄉，選擇前往法國發展。他們最先定居於人文薈萃的巴黎，積極參與各間沙龍和藝廊舉辦的展覽，期待在這座城市裡有所成長，並從其精彩多元的藝文環境中受益，這三位大師後來合稱為「巴黎藝壇之越南三傑」。 《彈奏月琴的女子》 於1943年聯展中展出時，枚中栨被藝評家歸為「親密派」畫家，因其畫作細膩地展現日常生活中平凡的場景。親密派畫家的作品常以女性人物做為主角，而《彈奏月琴的女子》這幅畫作的焦點便是一位輕撥月琴的優雅女子。月琴 (nguyet cam) 是一種二弦琴，越南語又稱其為「彈月」(dan nguyet). 在這幅柔美的絲畫作品中，輕撫月琴的女子身着輕盈長衫，而其身後沉静的翠玉色背景與瓶中的白花，同矮茶几上一本書名為《玉花》的紅皮書相互輝映。頗有意味的是，「玉花」亦是越南十八世纪長篇詩文《玉花古蹟傳》女主角的名字。此篇長詩歌頌美麗賢良的玉花和她丈夫堅定的愛情，故事中的玉花不但守住貞潔，更不畏艱難前往地府拯救她的丈夫，最後尚且原諒殺其丈夫的不仁之君。這幅作品藉由細膩的手法表現越南女性堅毅不屈的美德，並以流暢抒情的手法融合視覺和聽覺兩種感官，引領觀畫者親身感受畫中捕捉之稍縱即逝的私密時刻。