Artist finds niche with cloth creations

Textile style: Thuc working with colourful fabrics on a piece at her home studio in Hanoi. — AFP

IN a hot and stuffy room in Hanoi, Tran Thanh Thuc holds up a delicate silk scarf and begins snipping it into tiny pieces, ready to paste onto her works of art.

For four decades, Thuc has been recreating Vietnamese landscapes using vibrant shades of fabric cut from scarves, traditional ao dai (a long split tunic) – or whatever material she could find during years of poverty in the 1980s.