Handicrafts: Coracles covered with colourful paintings of ocean scenes and fishing (Source: internet) Vice Chairman of the Tam Ky city People’sCommittee, Nguyen Minh Nam, told Viet Nam News the award was announced at the2017 Asian Townscape Awards session in Fukuoka city, Japan, on July 27.
Nam said the prize was being awarded byUN-Habitat, Asian Habitat Society, Asian Townscape Design Society and FukuokaAsian Urban Research Centre, and the ceremony will be held in Yinchuan city onSeptember 28-29. “It’s a great honour for us. Efforts were made by localvillagers, the city’s administration and artists nationwide,” Nam said.
“We also expressed our thanks to the KoreaFoundation Community Art Exchange Programme and Korean artists and volunteersfor their decoration of the village with colourful murals on moss-covered wallsin 2016,” Nam said.
Tam Ky city and Tam Thanh commune launchedthe fishing village of Tam Thanh as a community-based art space for eco-tourismdevelopment. It’s also the first project in Vietnam that weaves art space intocommunity lifestyle.
The fishing village, with a population of6,000, is known nationwide and by foreign tourists for the murals in TrungThanh hamlet.
In March, artists from Singapore Technologyand Design University, Vietnam’s Fine Arts Association, colleges in Hanoi andlocal painters started painting a coracle for an exhibition in Tam Thanhvillage.
Artists also turned the old walls of 100houses in the village into colourful murals, depicting portraits of villagers,local scenes and regional panoramas. Photographers from the Republic of Korea,the Philippines and Turkey flocked to take photos at the village for anexhibition in Seoul and other cities last year.
Tam Thanh village has a 6km coastline and atranquil environment, and tourists can easily connect from there with Tam Kyand Hoi An city. It hosts around 500 visitors each day, and 2,000 tourists onweekends.
In 2013, Hoi An’s historic town centre waschosen for the 2013 Townscape Award by the UN-Habitat Regional Office inAsia.-VNA
VNA
