Artisan · Sơn mài · Hạ Thái village
Trần
Quang Minh
“Gold is shy. You bury it, then you let it come back.”
His seal, cut by his grandfather, pressed into the reverse of every screen and door.
- Craft
- Gilding & lacquerScreens, furniture, architectural work
- Workshop
- Hạ TháiThe old house at the end of the lane
- Learned from
- His grandfatherwho gilded the Thường Tín doors
- Signature
- Gold under the lotuson the large screens
- On LangSoul
- 1 workTakes commissions
01 — The maker
The last of the door gilders
The family’s trade was architectural — altars, doors, the red-and-gold of the communal houses — and Minh learned it as a boy on scaffolding. When that work thinned he brought the scale indoors: four-panel screens, cabinet fronts, the largest lacquer the village makes.
Gold leaf, he says, is the easy part. The hard part is deciding how deep to bury it, because the depth decides how the light will find it ten years on. He lays it thin, covers it in three coats, and polishes it back only where the lotus needs to shine.
02 — The works
One work from the bench
03 — Commission
Minh takes one large commission a season
A screen for a room, a wall of panels, a cabinet front. Tell us the room and the light and we will carry the conversation to the workshop, with photographs at every stage. Four to six months from first sketch to crate.
A letter from Hạ Thái
“The third panel has its gold now. I will not touch it for a month; it has to forget it was ever bright.”
Other makers we work with
