Chez Vu

Phú Quốc, Vietnam

June 2026

It is rare that I have the opportunity to meet the artist behind the creations I feature in this online exhibition. Yet for four days in June, my family and I had the privilege of staying with painter, ceramicist, and designer Vu, and his gracious wife Anh, at their remarkable homestay on a hillside overlooking the South China Sea.

The property they have created—a manor house and two chalets nestled among tropical gardens—climbs toward the rocky slopes of the Hàm Ninh Range, the mountainous spine of Phú Quốc Island at Vietnam’s southern tip.

Encountering the breadth of Vu’s ceramic work, fashioned from clays sourced from different regions of Vietnam, one cannot help but sense the influence of the surrounding landscape. There is something of the island’s weathered stone, forested hillsides, and rugged outcrops in these vessels.

Many of Vu’s pieces—including the tea cups shown here—juxtapose silky, flowing glazes with rough, granular textures that verge on sculptural protrusions. The effect is at once earthy and refined, as though opposing forces have found a momentary equilibrium.

Vu describes his creative process as instinctive rather than analytical. He works from feeling more than from plan. A piece begun in one spirit may evolve in another a day later, taking on a direction that could not have been anticipated at the outset.

One sunny morning in his studio, with Anh kindly interpreting, Vu showed me nearly a dozen vases and bowls awaiting their first firing. When I asked how a single vessel could finally display such varied colour gradations, he explained that much of the magic emerges in the kiln itself—the interaction of heat, atmosphere, and the different clays he employs.

Vu’s artistic journey began in the 1960s in a town outside Hanoi. His father, an engineer who also painted, and an uncle who achieved recognition as an artist, helped shape an environment in which creativity was ever present. Vu recalls having brushes in his hands from an early age.

Throughout the homestead, his artistic sensibility reveals itself at every turn: oil paintings adorning the walls, substantial ceramic vessels resting on hand-hewn shelves, cut-stone window frames, and even the decision to leave massive boulders exposed within the chalet bathrooms. Everywhere, art and craft are woven seamlessly into daily life.

To spend time at Chez Vu is to encounter a philosophy in which art is not separate from living. It is not decoration or adornment. Rather, it is a way of inhabiting the world—a natural expression of being itself.  

A Low Traditional 'Stool' from Hanoi

Hanoi, Vietnam

2008

One of the coolest experiences I had in Hanoi when I visited on my second trip there over 15 years ago was eating pho -- the traditional Vietnamese soup -- in a sidewalk eatery while seated on a super short chair or what we Americans would call a stool.

This modest bamboo, wood and rattan stool, given to me all those years ago by dear friends in Hanoi, reflects the quiet elegance of North Vietnamese craft traditions. The seat is woven from split rattan in a tight herringbone pattern, resting on a low bamboo frame whose proportions speak to the floor-level intimacy of Vietnamese domestic life. In Hanoi’s streets and courtyards, such stools were at one time everywhere — part of the visual vocabulary of daily living — used for tea, conversation, and the unhurried sociability of shared meals.

Based on what I’ve read regarding this stool’s craftsmanship, oxidation, and patterns of wear, it probably predates when it came into my possession. The joinery is hand-split and bound rather than machine-cut, and the weave shows the tight, geometric discipline characteristic of Hanoi workshop production before mechanized techniques became more widespread in the 2010s. The surface has a softened, naturally burnished patina rather than a uniform factory finish, suggesting long use and hand-rubbed oil finishing. Taken together, these details point to an origin in the mid to late 20th century — and already nearly as old as me when it was gifted to me.

The couple who gave it first introduced me to Hanoi’s culture of street dining and its easy merging of public and private space. Through them, I came to see how such a simple object quietly structures social life: light, portable, and durable, it can turn sidewalks and open spaces into places of gathering.

Beyond its utility, such a stool seems to carry a refined austerity. Natural fibers, disciplined weaving, and a surface softened by time give the object its understated beauty. It is at once artifact and companion — a reminder of friendship, of place, and of the enduring intelligence of everyday design.

If this post had a soundtrack, it would be my Vietnam trilogy on Mixcloud:

https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyPeetExpresso/good-evening-vietnam-240/

https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyPeetExpresso/last-train-to-hu%E1%BA%BF/

https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyPeetExpresso/in-search-of-the-lotus-248/

Moroccan Keepsakes

Morocco, December 1981

                                            

Introduction

In December of 1981, three friends and I — all of us then living in Lisbon — flew to Tangier and rented a small Fiat for a ten-day drive south into Morocco. We intended to spend Christmas somewhere near the Sahara. At the time this seemed perfectly reasonable.

From Tangier we drove through the Rif Mountains to Chaouen, then on to Fez, and afterward toward the desert towns of Erfoud and Rissani. The roads gradually emptied. Villages became smaller and farther apart. South of Fez the land turned rocky and treeless, and by then our plan had taken on the quality of improvisation.

Our ambition was to reach Rissani and then follow a truck track toward the Algerian frontier. We imagined crossing quietly into Algeria for a brief look at the Sahara from the other side before slipping back again unnoticed. None of us had any real idea whether this was possible.

The trip unfolded unevenly. There were long stretches of empty road and conversation, roadside cafés full of smoke and sweet tea, moments when the Fiat seemed on the verge of mechanical collapse, and the strange exhilaration that comes from traveling beyond the edge of certainty.

Along the way I picked up a few objects almost casually — a small incense tagine, a brass container, and an old Quranic tablet. Looking at them now, I see them less as souvenirs than as moments in the journey itself.

Object I — Miniature Incense Tagine from Chaouen

I purchased this miniature incense holder -- shaped like a traditional ceramic 'tagine' -- in a small shop in Chaouen, a town popular with adventurers in the foothills of the Rif Mountains. Unlike the large clay tagines used for cooking, this version was meant for incense — bakhoor (perfumed wood chips) or amber resin placed inside and heated beneath the conical lid.

At the time, Chaouen already felt dreamlike: steep lanes, whitewashed walls tinted blue in places, thin mountain air, and drifting wood smoke in the December cold. Yet my own memory of the town is inseparable from two experiences. The first was being guided into an open lot near the medina by a group of teenage boys who showed obvious disappointment when they weren’t compensated for their ‘effort.’ I didn’t realise how serious they were about their self-appointed job until we returned to our car the next day and discovered all four tires had been flattened.

My second memory is even less pleasant. A day or two after arriving in Chaouen, I was suddenly overcome with food poisoning and spent much of the rest of our stay there confined to the guesthouse while my companions disappeared into the surrounding mountains on an overnight trek. (At least I had a novel by Camus to comfort me.)

The evenings were cold. I remember lying awake beneath blankets listening to muffled voices from the street below. Smoke and unfamiliar cooking smells drifted through the window from the medina. Occasionally footsteps echoed in the lane outside.

The little incense burner became attached to those memories — not adventure exactly, but the sense of isolation, discomfort, and the peculiar vulnerability that comes with being ill in a strange place far from home.

Object II — Brass Container from Fez

I bought the pictured small brass container in Fez, where the journey entered a different rhythm entirely.

After the openness of the Rif mountain roads, Fez felt enclosed and intense, especially inside the old quarter. The medina seemed to function as a self-contained world of workshops, narrow passageways, braying animals, smoke, tools, and voices echoing between stone walls. Metalworkers hammered brass in dim stalls while spice merchants, leather sellers, and woodcarvers worked nearby. Everywhere there were repeating geometric patterns — in tiles, gates, trays, and engraved vessels like this one. The container's surface carried the same repeating geometry visible throughout the city.

The exact purpose of the container was uncertain. Such things might have held spices, tea, incense, or ceremonial powders. What mattered to me was less utility than presence: the object seemed to condense the medieval atmosphere of Fez into something portable.

Object III — Quranic Tablet from Erfoud

I found the Quranic tablet in the market at Erfoud near the edge of the Sahara.

By then the terrain had changed completely. The roads stretched across open rocky plains broken by oases, scattered settlements, and the occasional camel grazing in the distance. Everything felt exposed to weather and distance.

On our first night in town we visited a local bathhouse. After the long drive it should have felt restorative, but my memory of the place isn't positive: dim light, steam rising from the water, faces appearing suddenly through the mist and then disappearing again.

The outdoor market the next day was easier to appreciate. Fossils, minerals, carved stone, old tools, animal skins, and strange objects were spread beneath awnings while traders bargained nearby. Camels stood tethered in the dust.

The wooden tablet immediately stood apart from the surrounding goods. Its smooth surface was darkened with age and smoke. Stylized Arabic script framed a central hanging-lamp design against a lattice pattern. On the reverse side were faded handwritten lines in ink striking me as prayers or exercises in calligraphy.

The object felt used rather than manufactured for visitors. That was what drew me to it. It seemed to carry traces of another life before arriving in the market at Erfoud.

A day or two later, outside Rissani on Christmas Day, we hired a local guide who pointed us toward a truck track leading into the desert toward Algeria. Several miles outside town the Fiat slid into soft sand and became hopelessly stuck.

What followed was part disaster and part comedy. We pushed uselessly beneath the winter sun while the Sahara stretched silently in every direction. Eventually several truck drivers stopped to help and together we managed to free the car and drag it back onto firmer ground.

When I think now of the tablet, those moments return with it: desert dust, exhaustion, laughter, and the immense scale of the austere land around us.

Closing Note

Together, the incense tagine, the brass container, and the devotional tablet form a small personal exhibition of Morocco from December 1981. They're modest objects, for sure. None is especially valuable. Yet each preserves something larger than itself: the cold mountain air and smoke of Chaouen, the enclosed medieval world of Fez, and the strange luminous atmosphere of the Sahara beyond Erfoud and Rissani.

What also remains after all these years is not simply the route we traveled but the feelings experienced during the journey itself — the sense of isolation while I was laid up in Chaouen, strange foreboding in the bathhouse, mechanical uncertainty, and the reckless confidence of youth, which brought me farther than good judgment probably should have allowed.

The greatest present from the trip was ultimately the Sahara itself: reached by road on Christmas Day after a week moving steadily south by southeast through Morocco, carrying the four of us into a landscape both stark and luminous with a majesty that has stayed with me ever since.

The soundtrack for a post like this would have to be multi-faceted:

for early in the morning:

https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyP.../sahara-desert-flower-128/

for mid afternoon:

https://www.mixcloud.com/.../where-do-you-find-the-time-199/

for dinner time:

https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyP.../dreaming-in-timbuktu-145/

for late in the evening:

https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyPeetExpresso/blue-camel-164/

Wooden Paddle from Central Portugal

It was autumn 1981. I was living in suburban Lisbon and took a weekend camping trip with two dear friends: David, a Brazilian‑American scholar researching for his PhD, and Nucha, a recent history graduate from the University of Lisbon. We spent Friday night on sleeping bags inside the ruins of Abrantes Castle, and on Saturday morning drove north toward the medieval city of Tomar.

It was there , while driving along a wooded tributary of the Tejo that we spotted a tiny stone grist mill. Our curiosity got the best of us so we pulled over our Fiat and waded beside the riverbank to the stone riverside structure.

The mill was abandoned, its cool stone interior empty except for a single wooden paddle leaning against the base of one wall. Having inspected the object and speculated on its use, we carried it away, with the thought that the mill was no longer in use.

The object itself is modest in dimensions and weight: light wood, finger holes for grip, leather or hide patches nailed on each side as reinforcement for a central split repaired years earlier.

The paddle’s purpose is debated. While one AI site sees in it a flax tool, used in preparing the plant that becomes linen, I thought it was for use in pushing swaths of grain, and another site stated that this was plausible.

The argument for this as a ‘flax scrutcher’ goes like this. After flax stalks were soaked in water to loosen their fibers, workers had to knock away the brittle woody bits clinging to the stocks. A bundle of stalks would have been held against a board, and this paddle then swung down in quick, repeated strokes. The blows would have freed the soft fibers, which could then have been combed and spun into thread.

As for the other view, I’d suggest this was a grain paddle, for stirring or shifting grain as it was processed in the small mill. Both readings are plausible, I think, and maybe the paddle served more than one role in its previous rural Portuguese life.

From what I’ve read, hand-held paddles like this were common in rural Europe from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, when flax was still processed by hand before being woven into linen. Even as mechanized mills spread during the industrial era, small communities in Portugal continued to rely on simple wooden blades for everyday textile and grain work. Tools of this kind often remained in use well into the early twentieth century, repaired many times over, until rural mills were finally abandoned in favor of industrial production.

What matters now, I think, is this tool’s survival. Patched, worn, and adapted, it embodies the ingenuity of subsistence work—whether that was in linen or in grain. Like the Afghan carpet I last described or the Colima parrot pot described earlier, this wooden paddle is a witness to everyday craft traditions, retrieved by chance and now part of a personal collection that spans continents and centuries.

* The soundtrack for this post -- with medieval Andaluscian music -- is here: https://www.mixcloud.com/Dadd.../espa%C3%B1a-antigua-dpe118/

A ‘Tribal Afghan’ Carpet Story

In May 1989, traveling overland toward the Hindu Kush Mountains of northern Pakistan, I had stopped in urban Rawalpindi to catch a van that would take me north to the Karakoram Highway. One morning, stepping out from my modest hotel, I was approached by an earnest young man dressed in a shalwar kameez and a prayer cap carrying a rolled up object in his arms. With what seemed like a practiced motion, he quickly unfurled a carpet — this carpet — at my feet and asked what I would offer.

I recognized the piece, broadly, as an Afghan tribal work. At the time, Afghanistan was in the grip of war, and many refugees had crossed into Pakistan. Carpets—portable, durable, and culturally resonant—were among the goods they carried and traded. This one, with its bold geometry, saturated reds, and muted blues, seemed to speak of both tradition and displacement. I quickly made an offer and then found myself carrying a rug back to my room.

The Carpet Itself

This carpet is hand-knotted wool, with short, resilient pile and a wool foundation. Flip it over and the technical story comes into focus: asymmetrical knots typical of Afghan practice, and a knot density in the range of roughly 100-150 knots per square inch, and slightly depressed warps—all signs, so I’ve read, of village or camp production rather than urban workshop refinement.

Three large floral medallions stand within the off-cream field. My research suggests that these have some similarity to Turkmen guls but with adapted motifs. The structure and colour palette align with apparent Ersari Turkmen ethnic traditions, found in Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, and Pakistan. The freer drawing of the medallions suggests Uzbek or mixed village influences—typical of northern Afghan weaving in the late twentieth century. The natural wool ground is supposedly notable, less dense than classical Turkmen all-over patterning.

The colours in this rug are classic vegetable dyes: madder reds, indigo blues, browns and greens drawn from natural dye mixes, and undyed wool. The tones are softened rather than vivid, consistent with age and use—exactly what we might expect from a rug woven in the 1970s or 1980s and acquired in 1989.

Wear and Use

The carpet shows the marks of a working life. Frayed edges and the reduced pile indicate it was used underfoot rather than preserved as a decoration. (I’ve had this rug on the floor of homes in four countries!)

Subtle abrash—the gentle variation in color caused by small-batch dyeing— runs through the whole field, a sign of traditional production rather than factory uniformity.

Context and Continuity

By the late twentieth century, many weavings described as “tribal” were already being produced in settled or semi-settled village or refugee camp contexts, often for sale rather than solely for the weaver’s domestic use. In moments of upheaval, that production had moved with the weavers themselves.

Seen this way, the carpet belongs not just to a particular place, but to a pattern: of human movement, adaptation, and continuity. Designs shift, materials change, and markets intervene, but the practice of weaving persists.

An Object That Remains

Thirty-seven years after my on-the-street Rawalpindi purchase, this piece is more than a souvenir. It is a record of both my journey and broader movements—of people, of craft, and of history carried in wool. The carpet’s wear does not diminish it but gives the thing context.

So this ‘tribal Afghan’ carpet remains what it has always been: a functional object, yes, but one shaped by human hands, bearing the imprint of a particular moment in time and then quiet endurance beyond it.

The soundtrack for this post would have to be this:

https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyPeetExpresso/flight-to-kabul-163/

Vestiges of Memory: Portuguese Azulejos Now in Bohol

In August of 1979, I stepped away from graduate studies at Ohio State and set off on a backpacking trip across Europe. With a Europass in hand, I traveled solo to the UK then by train from London to Athens, where a chance encounter at the port changed the course of that journey and my life. There I met Sofia, a young Portuguese traveler bound for Mykonos. We became fast friends, and over three weeks of shared adventures she planted the seed: “Go to Portugal. Meet my family. See what you might do there.” (Sofia was working as an au pair in London, but advised me to visit her parents, which I did, and who graciously took me in for several months.)

By December of that same year I had left graduate school and the USA behind, carrying with me my experience teaching Russian and a desire to live and work abroad. England was my first stop, but by early 1980 Portugal became my home for the next two and a half years. I rooted in 'Lisboa' and started tutoring English, while I also traveled the country, learning the language and culture, absorbing the country's rhythms, its history and traditions.

It was during a visit to Coimbra, the country's capital until the 13th century and a cultural hub, that I found the blue-and-white tile among the photos below. In an amazing circumstance of luck, while I was staying in a rustic inn near an old building demolition site, I spotted a fragment of history among the rubble: a broken tile with its orange tree motif still vivid despite cracks and chips. This was no simple decoration — it was an antique azulejo, and from what I learned from an expert, likely from the mid 18th century. It might have once been part of a grand wall panel. Salvaging it felt like rescuing a piece of Coimbra's architectural soul.

Some time later, maybe in a shop in Lisbon that promised vintage and antique wares,

or maybe from a friend, I acquired the floral tiles shared in this post. From the nature of the colour palette and the brushwork, these were probably hand‑painted in the late 18th to early 19th century, rustic and imperfect, yet alive with tradition. Their designs carry forward centuries of Portuguese ceramic artistry, classic objects that embody continuity with designs refined over time.

Together, this small set of tiles tells a layered story. The Coimbra fragment speaks of endurance, survival, and the persistence of beauty through ruin. The floral tiles -- including two that I have added to the cornerstone of a bamboo shed recently built on my property -- illustrate growth, natural development, and the artisans’ ongoing dialogue with heritage. Side by side, they remind us that legacy is not only preserved in intact monuments but also in fragments and reinterpretations. My own journey — from Ohio to Athens, from Sofia’s invitation to Portugal, from rubble to rescued tile, and now around the world to 40 years in Asia — mirrors the same themes: creative initiation, continuity, and stories carried forward.

In Bohol, these azulejos rest far from their Portuguese origins, yet they remain vessels of heritage and memory. They are bridges across time and place, reminders that even fragments of embossed blossoms and fruit can speak of legacy, resilience, and the enduring beauty of cultural tradition.

If there were a soundtrack for this post, I'd make it this: https://www.mixcloud.com/DaddyPeetExpresso/daddy-peet-expresso-41/