Mai Trung Thu was among the first graduates of the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (1925–1930), a generation that would go on to shape the foundations of modern Vietnamese art. His works, sought after for their delicacy and quiet lyricism, remain fixtures in the art market to this day.
After moving to France in 1937, he devoted himself to ink and silk, returning time and again to a familiar cast of subjects: fair maidens, playful children, serene family scenes. His compositions are tightly controlled, leaving little room for accident—each line, each gesture, feels like an attempt to hold on to something fleeting: a fragile image of Vietnam, softened by memory, suspended in time.
Standing at the intersection of East and West, Mai Trung Thu seemed to carry with him a quiet tension: between European fine art and Vietnamese identity. Time and again, he returned to classical European icons, reimagining them through a Vietnamese lens.
This tension between two aesthetics was never a passing fascination, but a quiet struggle that lingered for decades. It found form in Mai Trung Thứ’s three interpretations of Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, painted over the course of sixteen years.
The 1958 version—medium-sized at 34.5 x 27.6 cm—depicts a black-haired Mona Lisa with soft almond eyes, dressed in a deep crimson áo dài, a moss-green silk veil cascading over her body. A full act of localization.
The 1961 version—smaller at 25 x 17.5 cm—was exhibited at the Salon de Noël in Paris the same year it was painted, and later sold at Sotheby’s in 2010 for 137.500 HKD (approximately 17.500 USD).
The 1974 version—the largest at 53.5 x 37.5 cm—first appeared at Sotheby’s in 1998 and resurfaced at Christie’s in 2021, fetching 5,625,000 HKD (approximately 717,000 USD).
Painted at the age of 68, the 1974 version is Mai Trung Thu’s final and most contemplative Mona Lisa. The palette turns cool, the skin glows with a muted gold, and dusk settles softly over the landscape. The figure remains familiar, but she has aged. No longer a girl, but a woman shaped by time.
What unites all three works is Mai Trung Thu’s reverence for Leonardo da Vinci’s original—from composition to proportion. But what he offers is not a replica. It is a cultural translation: a Mona Lisa deeply rooted in Vietnam, rendered in the medium he returned to again and again: gouache on silk.
“Mai Trung Thu drawing inspiration from Western art was nothing unusual,” notes curator Ace Le. “The École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine was itself a space of intersection—between European fine art traditions and Eastern sensibilities. At the time, from teachers like To Ngoc Van to peers like Pho and Dam, everyone wrestled with the same question: how do you preserve Vietnamese identity within an aesthetic framework shaped by the West—both in theory and in practice?”
The work is rendered on silk. But here, silk is more than a medium, it’s a statement. In contrast to oil, the dominant material of Western portraiture, silk became Mai Trung Thu’s way of asserting a Vietnamese identity within a Western visual framework.
The figure wears a traditional áo dài, seated against a mist-veiled view of Ha Long Bay. Her jet-black hair, softened by a sheer green veil, fades gently into distant mountains. Her hands are folded delicately in a posture distinctly rooted in Eastern grace.
By placing these deeply Vietnamese elements within a composition that echoes Mona Lisa, Mai Trung Thu seems to offer a quiet declaration: Vietnamese art does not belong on the margins and can stand alongside the canonical legacies of European art history.
“Perhaps Mai Trung Thu wasn’t simply painting a woman in these Mona Lisa portraits, but a symbol: Vietnamese identity itself,” curator Ace Le reflects. “It’s what he had been seeking since his earliest days at the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine. And in many ways, it remains a contemporary question: what is considered Vietnamese identity, in a world that is constantly shifting?”
Mai Trung Thu’s Mona Lisa (1974) is currently on view as part of the special exhibition From Roots That Keep Reaching, held on the ground floor of Quang San Art Museum. The show marks the centennial of the École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine (1925–2025) and runs from August 1, 2025.
- Venue: Quang San Museum of Art – 189B/3 Nguyen Van Huong, An Khanh Ward, Ho Chi Minh City
- Opening hours: 09:00 – 16:30, Tuesday to Sunday
- The exhibition is scheduled to run through January 2026.