As part of the activities to welcome the Lunar New Year 2022 and celebrate the founding anniversary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (February 3, 1930 – February 3, 2022), the exhibition displays 20 quartet prints of different topics, namely The Four Seasons Quartet, The Goddess Quartet, The Eight Immortals Quartet, Historical and Illustrative Quartet, from the Quartet Scroll Collection of the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum.
Speaking at the opening of the exhibition, Nguyen Anh Minh, Director of the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum, said that since its establishment, the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum has always been aware of the role and value of folk paintings in general and the value of four-scroll woodblock paintings in particular, throughout the flow of Vietnamese fine arts. Researching, collecting, preserving and promoting the value of folk paintings has always been an important task of the Museum.
The exhibition runs until February 28.
Four-scroll woodblock print, or quartet scroll, is a set of four printings that depict a wide variety of topics, such as the four seasons of the year, the four stages of human life, the four episodes from works of literature and popular legends, or the four idealised female figures.
Some series are even enhanced with beautiful Han or Nom calligraphy, as a wish of wealth and peace, or to provide a textual counterpart to the colourful images, enjoyed by the viewer. Thus, quartet scrolls have long been favoured to decorate houses or used as objects of spiritual veneration, depending on their motifs or subject matter. Furthermore, these series also provide vivid insight into our ancestors’ conception of time and daily life.
