City Night Stars

City Night Stars compresses Ho Chi Minh City into a lacquered triptych where skyline, women, and objects share the same glowing night. At left, two stacked verticals rhyme with the city’s icons: Bitexco’s lotus-inspired tower with its cantilevered helipad, and Landmark 81’s bamboo-cluster silhouette, both emblems of modern Saigon.

The central panel holds three frontally posed women in patterned áo dài. Huynh’s lacquer craft makes them luminous rather than volumetric: metal leaf, eggshell, and multiple resin coats are laid down, dried, wet-sanded, and polished so buried layers reappear as starry scintillation. The process explains the work’s internal light and its tidal greens and golds.

At right, a birdcage sits among rounded, ornamental forms. Read against the calm figures and the electric city, the cage introduces a soft friction between protection and constraint, a long-standing symbolism in art and visual culture.

Formally, Huynh orchestrates planar rhythm: architectural uprights act as window bays, arabesques lace the blacks, and wave motifs stitch the panels together. Color is held to malachite, umber, and gold, allowing technique to carry atmosphere. The painting’s argument sits in the material: lacquer’s slow layering and recovery of light mirror the city’s own layering of memory and modernity, so the “stars” of the title feel both celestial and embedded in the polished skin of the work.