In a small 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.

In four decades, Thuc has been recreating Vietnamese landscapes using vibrant shades of fabric cut from scarves, traditional ao dai or whatever material she could find during years of difficulty in the 1980s.

Often using hundreds of thousands of pieces of cloth to shape trees, rivers and patches of sky, the 61-year-old artist doesn't dare to cool her home studio with fans or air conditioning, even in the boiling summers of the northern Vietnam./.

VNA