The opening ceremony began with lights,colours and music that gave a glimpse of the uniqueness of the craftvillages participating in the festival. "The festival is to honour thequintessence of craftsmanship in the villages," Nguyen Van Thanh, headof the festival's organisers, said at the ceremony.
About 150 artisans from 34 craft villages in the country, includingthose involved with wood and bronze casting, conical-hat making,traditional embroidery and manual textile production, are participatingin the festival.
The biennial event will run till May 3, withartisans from Saijo in Japan and Gyeongju in the Republic of Korea alsoparticipating in it.
Earlier in the day, the spacededicated to performances by artisans and exhibitions of craft productswas opened at Nguyen Dinh Chieu Street, adjacent to Tu Tuong Park andthe Culture Museum.
More than 10 nha ruong (Hue-stylehouses with wooden beams and pillars) have been erected as exhibitionrooms, where visitors will get a chance to shop for products and seeartisans make the local Thanh Tien paper flowers, Sinh paper paintings,Bat Trang pottery from Hanoi and Bau Truc terracotta from Ninh Thuancentral province.
The house exhibiting Thanh Tienpaper flowers attracted large crowds, as people watched in amazement thetransformation of paper into art.
The Tu Tuong Parkwill display woven products, including the ethnic Zeng textiles fromlocal mountainous A Luoi District, the ethnic Tho Cam textiles from thenorthern mountainous Ha Giang Province, the local Thuy Thanh conicalhats and Thuan Loc hand embroidery.
The house of HoiAn silk, where the complete production circle of silk was on display,attracted many foreigners. Visitors can see the silkworm, the cocoon,the boiling and the weaving processes and the final product.
In recent years, Truc Chi, which is a kind of artistic paper, hasemerged as the best representative of the combination of traditionalcraft techniques and contemporary art. In the final process of makingeach paper sheet, the artisans add graphic designs to make the sheetitself an individual art item.
Understandably, theTruc Chi exhibition at the Hue Culture Museum was crowded, with thevisitors appreciating the use of the paper to make clothes, wallets,lanterns and umbrellas, besides boxes, candle holders and paintings.
At the museum, visitors can see the kimono, the Japanese nationalcostume, alongside a collection of royal and mandarin costumes from theNguyen Dynasty (1802-1945), and embroidery paintings of poems by localveteran artisan Le Van Kinh.
The festival offersvisitors a wide choice of Vietnamese craftsmanship. However, theambience might be boring to the local people, as the fourth event usesthe same motif as of the previous biennial festivals, the first onebeing held in 1999.
Some visitors said they expectedthe preservation of traditional crafts, but wanted creativity in theorganisation of the festival also.-VNA