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HISTORY OF TRADITIONAL PICTURES HAND EMBROIDERY
Embroidery is a traditional handicraft that has existed in Vietnam for quite some time. Inherently, the history of this traditional work is closely connected to the past spiritual history of the Vietnamese people.
Since the 1st century, aside from the flag embroidered with “Requite our debt to the country and avenge our native land” by the Trưng Sisters’ armed uprising, the Vietnamese people had used embroidery to decorate their home and to display beauty and confidence expressions.
However, up until now, nobody knows when the Vietnamese embroidery art was born? Who is the first person who had created and changed the normal sewing work into embroidery art?
Legend has it that, at the beginning of the 17th century, the Vietnamese embroidery art development had crossed a turning point. At that time, Mr. Le Cong Hanh (1606 – 1661) from Quat Dong Hamlet, Quat Dong Village, Thương Tín District, Hà Tây Province had collected the experiences and techniques of Vietnamese folk embroidery to popularize this handicraft.
During the feudal periods, embroidery was one of services provided to the royal and aristocratic circles. Embroidery product was created from fabrics made by Vietnamese craftsperson. At that time, the threads used for embroidery include natural dyes, such as “Tinctorial yam, Indigo, Indian almond pod, paletuvier water, leaves of phrynium, grinstone, flamboyant…” Many foreigners have admired the Vietnamese embroidery products. “After seeing the threads in dyes that looked dirty and ugly, it was quite amazing to see their transformation when the tinting process was over”.
Traditionally, embroidery had been done by Vietnamese women according to Confucian concept that girls must acquire four virtues: “Labor – Appearance – Speech – Behavior”. As the old saying goes:
“Men read books and recite poems, women embroider and sew.”
Most Vietnamese women from all over the country know how to embroider. However, professional embroiderers are often concentrated in Huế, the capital of the Nguyễn dynasty, There, Lady Hoàng Thị Cúc, Emperor Bảo Đại’s mother, and Queen Nam Phương had combined the advantages of European embroidery techniques with the quintessence of Asian embroidery art to elevate it to the royal level, reflecting Huế’s women charming and meticulous characters.
Gabrielle, a French scholar specializing oriental culture studies, wrote “In many places, people have transmitted through generations, an extraordinary art by painting in threads, making lotus flower bloom on silk, butterflies hover on blue water surface. Vietnamese embroiderers are more skillful than the Chinese in their use of sewing with fine threads and their color mixing methods…”
Hocquard, an author, said about the embroidery at the end of 19th century: “The Vietnamese embroiderers were very clever in distributing color on silk to create the harmonious embroidered pieces without any contrast.”
Centuries passed by, the embroidery art went up and down but it kept the national cultural character.
At the beginning of 1980s, Vietnamese silk embroidered artworks gradually rise up to the summit of the art world.
Through various subjects about life, death, hope and fate, being human’s hidden belief and characters, the embroidery artwork has created the view of our world by the images of musical realm and expressed by the national traditional arts.
SH VIETNAM
Ten years ago, two artists, Nguyễn Mạnh Tuấn and Võ Thị Loan Mắt Nhung, founded the company SH Vietnam with a new idea to enhance this craft by combining the painting art with the inherited quintessence of traditional embroidery art.
Realizing that this artwork is in high demand by the customers, SH Vietnam has created high quality Hand-Embroidery On Silk with the help of experienced artisans to provide beautiful and luxurious decorations for the home as well as meaningful gifts for friends and relatives.
Using a strict control system, SH Vietnam offers the highest quality artworks and the most professional services to satisfy the customers’ needs.
Each SH product is a work of art with elaborate design and stitching. The materials comprise natural silk, silk threads and DMC threads from France and high-quality cotton from Japan.
Furthermore, SH Vietnam continues to improve its techniques in order to meet the customers’ desire and expectations as well as responding to the increasingly stringent requirements of the market.
As a result, SH Vietnam has become an international standard brand name and is extremely well known at home and abroad. Its artworks are in high demand by difficult customers in domestic and international markets such as Europe, America and Asia.
With a great number of artworks and superb designs to choose from, along with the assistance of enthusiastic specialists, you will be able to choose your favorite work of art painstakingly created by hand and in sharp detail by artists from SH Vietnam.
EVALUATING A HAND-EMBROIDERY ARTWORK
Each SH hand-embroidery artwork is created not only from threads, needle, fabric and time but also from the craftsperson’s reminiscence and deep emotion of their native land, childhood, history and even their future.
As a result, each artwork must be strictly examined by the Evaluation Board before presenting it to the customers. Each artwork comes with its certificate and origin.
The evaluation process is carried out according to the following basis:
- Review the content and value of the artwork.
- Embroidery techniques and color mixing.
- Time and space in the artwork depicted by color, techniques, content.
- Perspective rules (near and far).
- Determine the embroidering time spent on delicate and prominent points.
Hand emberoidered tablecloths:
Hand embroidered on Ao Dai:
Hand embroidered shawls:
SILK HAND EMBROIDERY SH VIETNAM
- 114A/12 Trần Quốc Toản Street, Ward 7, District 3, Hồ Chí Minh City, Việt Nam
- Tel: +84 28 39 325 098 – Fax: +84 28 39 325 098
- Hotline: +84 902 660 822 – +84 978 10 68 68
- Email: tranhtheush@gmail.com
- Web: http://tranhtheutaysh.com