After her return to Vietnam after graduating from the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in East Germany with a Masters Degree, Trịnh Kim Vinh was appointed the head of the drawing department at the Vietnam Fine Arts College.
In the slightly unusual painting from a war artist (fig. 1), Vinh depicts a group of soldiers marching through the jungle on lithograph paper. While the scene itself is not unusual, the medium was not widely used at the time, due to the technical experience needed to employ lithography. A lithograph is a print made by drawing on limestone with wax crayons, applying ink onto the stone and printing the image onto paper. Lithography is a planographic printing process that makes use of the immiscibility of grease and water. In the lithographic process, ink is applied to a grease-treated image on the flat printing surface; nonimage (blank) areas, which hold moisture, repel the lithographic ink.
