Artisan · Sơn mài · Hạ Thái village

Nguyễn
Văn Thái

Lacquer master · Third generation · At the bench since 1989

“I count a work in seasons, not days. A panel started in the rains will never polish like one started in the dry.”

His seal, pressed into the final coat on the reverse of every work. Yours will carry it.

Craft: Natural lacquerPanels, trays, screens
Workshop: Hạ TháiFamily courtyard, lane 3
Learned from: His fatherwho learned from his
Signature: Eggshell moonsover buried gold
On LangSoul: 3 worksTakes commissions

01 — The maker

Thirty-seven years of the same twelve layers

He was nine when his father first let him hold the polishing stone, and nineteen before he was allowed to lay a coat on anything that would leave the house.

Hands wet-sanding a lacquer board under a thin stream of water, grey slurry running off the black surface, in the Hạ Thái lacquer workshop, dark wooden drying cabinets behind, palette of brown-black, cinnabar and dull gold

Fingers sorting fragments of duck eggshell by shade on a dark tray, in the Hạ Thái lacquer workshop, dark wooden drying cabinets behind, palette of brown-black, cinnabar and dull gold

He was nine when his father first let him hold the polishing stone, and nineteen before he was allowed to lay a coat on anything that would leave the house.

Thái’s family has made lacquer in Hạ Thái for three generations that anyone can name, and probably longer. His grandfather gilded temple doors. His father, in the lean years of the 1980s, kept the workshop alive on trays and boxes for the Hà Nội market. Thái came of age as painters from the city rediscovered the village, and he learned to think of a board not as a thing to decorate but as a surface that could hold a picture.

What sets his work apart is patience with the moon. Where other workshops press eggshell quickly and in sheets, Thái sorts each fragment by its curve and places it so the cracks between pieces draw the light. The gold beneath is laid thin and then buried under three more coats, so that it surfaces only where he polishes hardest — the water, the edge of a cloud, the inside of a bowl.

He works with his wife, Đỗ Thị Hương, who leads the eggshell inlay, and with two apprentices from the lane. He does not sign the front of a work. The seal on the reverse, he says, is enough: “The front belongs to whoever lives with it.”

A square of gold leaf lifted on a bamboo knife over wet lacquer, in the Hạ Thái lacquer workshop, dark wooden drying cabinets behind, palette of brown-black, cinnabar and dull gold

The inside of a dark wooden drying cabinet, lacquer boards curing on racks in humid air, in the Hạ Thái lacquer workshop, dark wooden drying cabinets behind, palette of brown-black, cinnabar and dull gold

02 — The works

Three works from the bench

All lacquer works

Moon over Hạ Thái

Panel · Unique

$1,240

Low tray, red lacquer

Tray · Edition of 12

$280

Offering bowl, indigo

Bowl · Edition of 8

$340

All lacquer works

03 — Commission

Thái takes two commissions a season

A panel to a size, a screen for a room, a pair of trays to match a table. Tell us what you have in mind and we will carry the conversation to the workshop, with photographs at every stage. Three to five months from first sketch to crate.

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A letter from Hạ Thái

“The board for the London panel took its fourth coat this week. The weather is right — cool and damp. I am sending a photograph of the moon before I bury it.”

— to a collector, September 2026. Every commission receives letters like this.

Start a commission

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