Formally requested by Vietnam First Lady Mai Thi Hanh, Boi Tran Garden was privileged to host a cultural exchange meeting combined with Hue royal refined music and Hue fine dining on the official first foreign visit to Vietnam of Laos First Lady Naly Sisoulith.
The path of art is vast and endless. It always urges us to work and create without rest. For painter Boi Tran, when holding a brush, a palette knife, or a pen, all can become works of art. And this garden is also a work that she cherishes. It has no boundary between surrealism and realism. And that is exactly the artistic path that she has chosen.
Many of the old culinary traditions live on, and today, Hue cuisine is held to be Vietnam’s most delicious and diverse. A visit to Ancient Hue, a home restaurant and gallery of an eccentric, elegant artist and chef Boi Tran, gives visitors an inkling of what a royal banquet and a meal crafted.
Writing on Hue, John Krich pauses in Boi Tran’s garden, where the light disappears before the first course. What emerges in its place is not darkness, but a different clarity, one in which the meal is no longer seen, but recognised.
There are places where history is told, and others where it is quietly kept. Hue belongs to the latter. When Anthony Bourdain came to film for his show Parts Unknown aired on CNN, what emerged was not a story of food, but of memory made tangible. At Boi Tran Garden, a meal unfolds alongside architecture, ritual and the residue of time. Flavours do not seek intensity, but balance; gestures do not display, but endure. In such a place, taste becomes a language through which the past continues to live.
Hue becomes a poem capital in Vietnam thanks to its nature-blended architecture. In some aspects, the renaissance of pillar houses contributes to the reconstruction, preservation and protection of cityscape, cultural awareness and consciousness of this Imperial city.
