Kim Hoang Folk Paintings: The Revival of Vietnam's "Red Art"
There are art histories that resemble miracles. That of Kim Hoàng prints is one such story. For seventy years, this artistic tradition, born in a village west of Hanoi, was considered definitively lost — swept away by floods, erased by wars, forgotten by time. Then, in 2016, a woman decided to revive it. Today, Kim Hoàng prints — instantly recognizable by their vibrant red backgrounds — are making a comeback in galleries, homes, and collections worldwide.
To understand why this revival is a major cultural event, one must go back to the origins of this unique tradition, understand what distinguishes it from its sisters Đông Hồ and Hàng Trống, and appreciate the scale of the work accomplished to save it from oblivion.
A village at the crossroads
The village of Kim Hoàng is located in the Vân Canh commune, Hoài Đức district, now integrated into the city of Hanoi. Its geographical position shaped its artistic identity: situated at the western gate of the ancient imperial capital of Thăng Long, it was at the junction between two worlds. On one side, the countryside of Xứ Đoài, rural, warm, attached to peasant traditions. On the other, the cultural and commercial effervescence of the city, with its literati, merchants, and influences from across the empire.
According to the Vietnamese National Encyclopedia, the name Kim Hoàng itself is a contraction of two ancient villages — Kim Bảng and Hoàng Bảng — which united around a single pagoda, the Đại Bi tự. It is from this dual identity — rural and cultivated, popular and scholarly — that the particular style of Kim Hoàng prints emerged: more sophisticated than Đông Hồ, more spontaneous than Hàng Trống.
According to researcher Nguyễn Thị Thu Hòa, Kim Hoàng prints developed from the second half of the 18th century. Popular tradition attributes their founding to the Nguyễn Sĩ family, who moved from Thanh Hoá province to Thăng Long in the early 18th century. Kim Hoàng prints reached their peak in the 18th and 19th centuries, before dying out in the mid-20th century.
The Golden Age: When Kim Hoàng Rivaled Đông Hồ and Hàng Trống
Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Kim Hoàng folk prints experienced an intense and vigorous life of their own. The images depicted the simple and familiar life of the inhabitants of the Red River Delta.
At that time, Kim Hoàng, along with Đông Hồ (Bắc Ninh province) and Hàng Trống (Hanoi), formed the triumvirate of major folk print traditions in North Vietnam. Each had its market, its style, its audience. Kim Hoàng mainly supplied the markets of the surrounding districts — Mỗ, La, Canh, Cót — and regional fairs in the weeks leading up to Tet.
The organization of production was collective and structured: Kim Hoàng artisans did not work in isolation, family by family, as in other print villages, but grouped together in a guild (phường nghề) with its leader, rules, and rituals. The engraved woodblocks were the common property of the guild, distributed to families on the day commemorating the founder (15th day of the 11th lunar month) and returned after Tet.
Production was not a permanent activity but concentrated in the month preceding the Lunar New Year. From the 15th day of the last month, after the founder's ceremony, families dispersed to rural markets to sell their prints, most intensively in the days before Tet.
The 1915 Catastrophe: When the Waters Swept Everything Away
In 1915, a significant historical event definitively changed the destiny of this artistic tradition: a catastrophic flood caused the Liên Mạc dike to break, sweeping away the vast majority of engraved woodblocks — the most precious asset, the "heart" of the village craftsmanship.
Without engraved blocks, no production. Without production, no income. And in the context of the social and political upheavals of the 20th century — French colonization, revolution, successive wars — no one had the resources or the peace of mind to rebuild this long-lost heritage.
The Kim Hoàng tradition almost disappeared completely. According to researcher Nguyễn Thị Thu Hòa, the last documented appearance of Kim Hoàng prints dates back to the Tet of 1947. After that date: seventy years of silence.
At the beginning of the revival project, only a few models remained: the rooster (gà) and pig (lợn) prints preserved at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum — and even these were restored versions, whose faithfulness to the originals was uncertain.
"The Red Art": What Makes Kim Hoàng Unique
Before recounting the revival, it is important to understand why Kim Hoàng prints deserve to be saved — what radically distinguishes them from all other Vietnamese folk print traditions.
The Red Background: An Unmistakable Visual Signature
Their most immediately striking characteristic is their intensely colored background. Kim Hoàng prints are printed on red paper (giấy hồng điều) or golden yellow paper (giấy tàu vàng) — which is why they are also called "tranh đỏ" (red prints), as opposed to Đông Hồ's "tranh trắng" (white prints).
The creation of this red background is an art in itself: the dó paper is divided into two thin layers, then brushed with pine resin and a solution composed of red dyes (phẩm điều), floral pigments (phẩm hoa hiên), mixed with rice flour glue and alum to resist humidity. After application, the paper is dried flat to maintain its flexibility and flatness.
This red background is not just an aesthetic choice. In Vietnamese symbolism, red is the color of luck, celebration, and blessing. Hanging a red print at the entrance of a house during Tet means opening the door to happiness and closing it to evil spirits.
A Hybrid Technique Between Đông Hồ and Hàng Trống
While Đông Hồ exclusively uses engraved blocks (one per color, printing face-down onto the paper) and Hàng Trống only prints the black outline before adding colors with a brush, Kim Hoàng combines both approaches in a two-stage process.
First step: in nhá (ghost printing). The artisan places the paper on the engraved block (flat printing technique, like Hàng Trống, unlike Đông Hồ's face-down technique) and applies light pressure to obtain a pale, barely visible outline. On this network of ghost lines, the artisan freely paints the colors with a brush — a stage of pure individual creation where each artisan expresses their personal interpretation of the design.
Second step: in đồ (final printing). The colored paper is placed back on the block and printed a second time, more firmly, with the artisan rubbing the back of the paper with a dried loofah sponge to bring out the black outlines clearly. The result is an image that is both engraved and painted, mechanical and personal.
This technique — known as "half-print, half-painting" (bán in bán vẽ) — is the key to Kim Hoàng's identity: more artisanal than Đông Hồ (where printing mechanizes the process more), but more direct and popular than Hàng Trống (whose brush painting can reach a sophistication close to fine art).
The Pigments: A Vibrant Natural Palette
The colors used in Kim Hoàng prints all come from natural sources, bound by buffalo hide glue — different from the glutinous rice glue used in Đông Hồ. White comes from finely ground plaster or chalk dissolved in water; indigo blue is a mixture of India ink and indigo plant water; red comes from cinnabar (son); black from rice straw ashes; green from copper patina (gỉ đồng); and yellow from the juice of the gardenia jasminoides fruit (dành dành).
These characteristic chromatic ranges — brick red, vermilion red, peony red, canary yellow — give Kim Hoàng prints a luminosity and vitality that other print traditions do not possess to the same degree. Against a red background, the figures seem to radiate.
Poetry in the Image: The Art of Scholars
Another key distinction: Kim Hoàng deliberately integrates calligraphy and poetry into the composition. Inscriptions are not limited to the title of the work — they take the form of complete poems in Hán characters, written in cursive style in the left corner of the image.
These verses are not mere explanatory captions. They constitute an additional layer of meaning, allowing the work to be appreciated on two levels: visually by all, and literarily by scholars capable of reading classical characters. Kim Hoàng thus simultaneously satisfies "those who can read and those who cannot read," as the national encyclopedia states.
As an example, Kim Hoàng rooster prints are not isolated images but facing pairs, each bust carrying a four-line poem of seven characters (thất ngôn tứ tuyệt) describing the five Confucian virtues of the rooster: literacy (văn), strength (võ), bravery (dũng), benevolence (nhân), and loyalty (tín).
2016: The Great Resurrection
It was in 2016 that researcher Nguyễn Thị Thu Hòa, director of the Hanoi Ceramics Museum, personally funded the project "Khôi phục tranh dân gian Kim Hoàng" (Restoration of Kim Hoàng Folk Prints), bringing together artisans, collectors, painters, art history researchers, and photographers.
The undertaking was colossal. The manufacturing techniques had almost no living witnesses. The few available pieces of information — the blocks are engraved on wood, black outlines are printed, colors are added by hand, pigments are of natural origin — were terribly incomplete.
To reconstruct the lost models, the team relied on the rare originals preserved at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum, and especially on the work Imagerie Populaire Vietnamienne published in 1960 by the French researcher Maurice Durand for the École française d'Extrême-Orient. In this work, Durand had reproduced and cataloged hundreds of prints without always distinguishing their provenance — but thanks to their chromatic palette and style, the team was able to identify about a hundred Kim Hoàng models.
The reconstruction of the engraving technique itself was a particular challenge. Choosing the right wood — bois thị (Diospyros lotus), soft, flexible, resistant, not prone to cracks — was only the first step. The artisan then had to use up to forty different types of chisels to engrave each block. For a single rooster block (Thần Kê), the work could take up to six days.
After numerous trials and adjustments, the group developed the exact technical formula to recreate the characteristic red background, found the correct dosages of natural pigments, and reconstructed the two-stage printing process (in nhá then in đồ). To date, the project has restored 33 woodblock models, 19 hand-painted models, and created new ones.
Only one artisan native to Kim Hoàng continues the tradition in the village itself today: Đào Đình Trung, born in 1980. His work, combined with that of artisans trained as part of the project, represents the tenuous but real thread connecting 21st-century Kim Hoàng to that of the 18th century.
Themes: Between Piety, Hope, and Humor
The reconstructed repertoire of Kim Hoàng prints covers the same broad categories as other popular traditions, but with its own distinct flavor.
Symbolic animals hold a central place. The rooster (Thần Kê, divine rooster) and the prosperity pig (lợn Kim Hoàng) are the two most emblematic motifs. The Kim Hoàng pig is particularly artistically striking: its body in black flat areas, details in dazzling white standing out against the red background, with touches of rosy white where the color is lighter — an effect of spontaneity and vitality that only handwork can produce.
Votive prints (tutelary deities, protective creatures like the nghê — Vietnamese lion — or the dragon) had a strong apotropaic function: hung at the entrance of houses, they chased away evil spirits. Some compositions represent the four guardian generals of the cardinal points, incarnations of zodiac animals — dragon, snake, goat, rat — symbols of protection and exorcism.
Narrative prints draw inspiration from classic Chinese and Vietnamese tales, often accompanied by inscriptions in parallel couplets. They include references to the history of the Three Kingdoms (Tam Quốc), figures of Confucian filial piety, and popular wisdom stories.
Scenes of daily life — plowing, spring festivals, children's games — complete the panorama with the warmth and humor characteristic of Vietnamese folk art.
Kim Hoàng Today: Between Collection and Everyday Life
The revival of Kim Hoàng is not just a matter for museums and researchers. Contemporary artists like painter Trần Quốc Đức (born in the 1990s) have embraced this tradition to renew it, integrating ancestral techniques with a contemporary artistic sensibility: more fluid lines, more balanced compositions, a slightly reinterpreted palette — all while preserving the spirit and symbolic depth of the originals.
Kim Hoàng prints integrate remarkably easily into contemporary interiors. Their intense red background creates an immediate focal point on a white wall — a visual presence that Đông Hồ's pearlescent-backed prints do not possess to the same degree. In a minimalist or uncluttered interior, a simply framed Kim Hoàng print becomes a strong artistic statement, both ancient and resolutely current.
At Viet Art (vietart.eu), we offer a selection of Kim Hoàng prints from the revival project — pieces that combine the authenticity of traditional technique with the vitality of an art that chose to survive. Each piece comes with an explanatory sheet detailing its title, symbolism, and history.
Kim Hoàng, Đông Hồ, Hàng Trống: three sisters, three personalities
To summarize the differences between the three great traditions:
Đông Hồ is the print of the rural world — robust, colorful, mechanical in its production, with its broad flat areas and bold colors on a pearlescent background. Hàng Trống is the print of the city — sophisticated, pictorial, unique in each copy thanks to the brushwork, with its soft hues on white paper. Kim Hoàng is the link between the two — popular like Đông Hồ, artisanal like Hàng Trống, but recognizable among all by its vibrant red backgrounds and poetic inscriptions in Hán characters.
As researcher Thu Hòa beautifully puts it: "Kim Hoàng is the hinge between the other two traditions."
Conclusion: a revival that awaits you
The history of Kim Hoàng prints is, in miniature, the history of Vietnamese culture as a whole: ancient, resilient, capable of overcoming catastrophes and oblivion to be reborn stronger. Seventy years of silence were not enough to extinguish the beauty of these red images.
To own a Kim Hoàng print today is to hold in your hands the result of a collective cultural miracle — the stubbornness of a researcher, the know-how of dozens of artisans, the memory of a village, and the timeless beauty of an art that decided to continue living.
Discover our selection at vietart.eu — and let the red of Kim Hoàng into your life.