DRAGON MOTIF - The event Mừng Xuân Giáp Thìn (Happy New Year of the Dragon 2024) features colour paintings in different materials featuring the themes of life, love and spring created by 71 artists. It celebrates the Lunar New Year, which is the Year of Dragon. Photo courtesy from HCM City Fine Arts Association

The event, Mừng Xuân Giáp Thìn (Happy New Year of the Dragon 2024), celebrates the Lunar New Year holiday - the Year of Dragon - which falls on February 10 this year.

It displays 83 colour paintings in different materials such as oil, acryic, watercolour, silk, thuỷ mặc (ink & wash), and ceramics.

The event’s themes include spring, love and youth created by 71 artists from HCM City and other cities and provinces.

Images of dragons – which symbolise power, nobility, honour, luck, and success in traditional Vietnamese culture - are highlighted.

Many paintings tell the stories of folk religion in Việt Nam.

This religion has various levels: inside the nuclear family (worship grandparents, and ancestors); in the whole family (worship the ancestors of the extended family; each family group has a common worship house, where the head of the family group will maintain worshipping practice); at national level (Hùng Kings Commemoration Day on March 10 of the lunar calendar).

The artists use their art to feature Vietnamese people, their culture and lifestyle.

Their paintings highlight people and life with ideas hidden within vivid colours and shades.

“All works at the exhibition Mừng Xuân Giáp Thìn are music and songs about life and love. Images of dragons on many paintings signal the coming of happy and successful spring,” said veteran sculptor Nguyễn Xuân Tiên, chairman of the Association.

Mừng Xuân Giáp Thìn will run through January 22 at 1 Einstein Street, Bình Thọ Commune in Thủ Đức City. — VNS