Christie’s 20th Century Day Sale brings together a focused group of seventeen works tracing several strands of Vietnamese modern art and its wider Indochinese context.

The selection opens with three paintings by Vu Cao Dam, Le bouquet, Divinité and Le repos, and continues with works by Alix Aymé, whose long engagement with Vietnam occupies a distinctive place within the history surrounding the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine. Four works by Le Pho, including La toilette, are joined by Mai Trung Thu’s Femme près de la fenêtre and Nguyen Phan Chanh’s Exorcism, bringing together artists whose careers emerged from the formative decades of Vietnamese modernism.

Lacquer forms another important thread. Pham Hau’s Les cerfs and Ngo Manh Quynh’s Deers in the Forest point to the transformation of lacquer from a traditional craft medium into a modern pictorial language. The later twentieth century is represented by Nguyen Trung, through both Elegant Lady with Frangipani and Abstraction, and Nguyen Kim Dong’s Ethnic Minority Women of Tonkin.

Across silk, lacquer and oil, the seventeen works resist any singular definition of Vietnamese modernism. Instead, they reveal a field shaped by different generations, materials and artistic trajectories, from intimate figuration and decorative synthesis to lyrical painting and abstraction.

20th Century Day Sale
Christie’s, The Henderson, Hong Kong
30 September 2026, 1:30 PM HKT