The process may be exacting, but San’s labour yields something simple: delight. She recalls how visitors drifted into her first exhibition in 2022 because the vases looked pretty and colourful. “The fact that people can see and touch the vases, or hug them if they feel like it… It’s a bit like reconnecting with things from before everything became computerised,” she says. It’s no surprise that, in most of the posts on her Instagram feed, San herself appears with her arms wrapped around the vases—some of them as tall as her.
Photographed by Antoine Willemart
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of whimsy, must be in want of whimsy-fulfilling objects. Ask San about her guilty pleasures and, true to form, she says, “Smiski and little Japanese Lego houses”—her son serving as a convenient excuse to invest in them. She also obsessively hunts for ‘wooden feet’, the base used to prop up traditional Chinese vases, around Place du Jeu de Balle, the flea-market square near her home. Set on one, a vase stops being a work in progress and turns into something finished, made by San from scratch with her own two hands. All that’s left is the hug.
This story featuring Shishi San, a Vietnam-born artist from Belgium, appears in Vogue India’s November-December 2026 issue. Subscribe here or pick up an issue from a newsstand near you.
