A family that produced at least three working artists is putting its work on the walls of the Việt Nam Fine Art Museum in Hà Nội. Following Father's Footsteps opened on October 2 and runs until October 7 at the museum on Nguyễn Thái Học Street, and it gathers paintings and sculpture by three of the seven children raised by painter Hồng Vân — an artist best remembered for his portraits of President Hồ Chí Minh made during the 1970s.

The siblings are Nguyễn Hồng Hưng, Vân Thuyết and Mai Trang, and each has taken a very different path. Hưng, a painter, sculptor, writer and retired lecturer who taught visual principles in Hồ Chí Minh City colleges until 2017, shows works including Tiên Dung-Chử Đồng Tử, Papaya Tree and the prize-winning Waiting for Good News. He's relaxed about materials — ceramic, wood, bronze, even composite — and insists he never repeats himself. His textbooks on visual design and composition are respected reading in Vietnamese art circles.

Thuyết, 72, started out as a violist before moving into wood carving, and later sculpture. He brings roughly 60 bronze pieces to the show, with themes of love and the human condition: Honeymoon Night, The Girl, Autumn Wind, Love. He has won a top international painting prize in the United States, and his sculptures stand in public parks in China and Japan. He's also a published poet with a taste for the meditative and metaphysical.

The youngest, Mai Trang, is the one with the strongest holiday hook for European-based travellers: she's self-taught, lives in Örebro, Sweden, and has staged more than 20 exhibitions abroad, with works held in galleries in Italy. For this show she brought canvases from Sweden depicting Hà Nội's Old Quarter, women, nature and everyday people — a nostalgic, colour-driven view of her home city from a distance. Art lovers may know her face before her name: she was the model for Bùi Xuân Phái's famous 1988 portrait of her, a painting that later inspired much of her own work.

Fellow artists quoted at the opening didn't hold back with praise — one collector reportedly bought Trang's entire exhibition some years ago, and Hưng already has three pieces in the museum's permanent collection.

Why should a traveller care? If you're in Hà Nội this week, it's a rare chance to see three generations-worth of a single artistic family under one roof, in a museum that is itself one of the city's most pleasant buildings. And even after the show closes, the Việt Nam Fine Art Museum is worth an hour of any Hanoi itinerary: lacquer painting, Buddhist sculpture and French-colonial-era works, all a short walk from the Temple of Literature.

If you miss it, Trang's Hanoi paintings offer a good excuse to seek out Vietnamese contemporary art abroad — her work turns up in European galleries far more often than most of her compatriots'. — Vietnam News Life