Customer Reviews

Vietnamese Ceramics: A Separate Tradition

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I found this book both enjoyable and disconcerting. As a modest collector of Vietnamese blue and white, mostly acquired recently in Indonesia and the Philippines, I found a great deal of information and a large number of illustrations which helped me with dating and provenance. There are some terrific illustrations of early pieces which I can only dream of finding. Many of the illustrations of later blue and white, (equally unobtainable and unseen in the shops of Kuta or Manila), were new to me and show a convergence to more conventional Chinese forms of design. (I personally find the earlier Vietnamese pieces so full of vigour and simplicity missing in most Ming pieces).

To make things worse, the book opened a whole new realm of marvelous earlier (mostly) monochrome pieces which has sent me out on a new search.

You may gather that I enjoyed it tremendously, I know of no other book which covers the subject in such detail. My wife will hate it because my collecting will take on a more vigorous life as a result of reading it!