Dong Ho Folk Painting

Illustrative photo.

Kinh Bac is the cradle smooth Quan Ho folk-songs, ancient village communal houses, famous traditional craft villages, including Dong Ho painting village.

Dong Ho painting, or its full name of folk wooden cravings of Dong Ho, is a kind of Vietnamese folk painting which is derived from Dong Ho village – Song Ho commune, Thuan Thanh district, Bac Ninh province.

Craft village of Dong Ho folk paintings has a history of about 500 years. In the past, the paintings had been sold mainly to serve for the Lunar New Year Festival when the rural people had bought the paintings to hang them on the wall and then removed them off the wall as the year end to be ready for new paintings.

Besides the characteristics of the lines and lay-out, the folk features of Dong Ho paintings are also expressed in color and printing paper materials. The printing paper used for Dong Ho paintings is the scallop-paper: scallop (a scallop with in shell in the sea) shells are crushed and mixed with the glue (the glue is made from powder of rice or sticky rice, sometimes made from tapioca starch) sand then brushed on the Poonah-paper by a pine-needle-brush). Brushing lines of pine-needles coordinated with a natural scallop shell create the white color with sparkling of tiny scallop shells. The colors used in the painting are naturally colors derived from plants such as black (of charcoal or bamboo charcoal), blue (of copper rust, indigo leaves), yellow (of Sophora Janocia), red (of red gravel, sapan-wood) …

Dong Ho paintings issue the enduring vitality and special appeal to many generations of Vietnamese as well as foreign visitors because the themes of paintings reflected truly rustic, simple, close life of Vietnamese culture. They are images of pigs, chickens, wedding of mice, girls catching coconuts or uniquely with scenes the jealousy of the young couple…

In 2013, dong Ho folk painting profession was recognized as a national intangible cultural heritage. In order to preserve and develop Dong Ho folk paintings, the Provincial People’s Committee has developed a project to preserve and promote dong Ho folk paintings in the period of 2014 – 2020, and at the same time built a Conservation Center to promote the value of paintings. Dong Ho folk in Song Ho commune, Thuan Thanh district, Bac Ninh province.