The morning sun flashes through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, but master

“Jungle River,” 2002, silk and cotton thread on gabardine.

embroiderer Bui Thi Nam has been awake for hours, examining an exquisite jungle image by celebrated nature photographer Frans Lanting. She is an artist trained in the highly refined skill of breathing life into cloth. Today she is making mist.

Continuing the centuries-old tradition of Vietnamese embroiderers who drew inspiration from paintings by renowned artists, the La Than Imperial Embroidery team interprets images by contemporary nature photographers. Its founders, Lawrence A. Gooberman and Jennifer Ha Than, aspire to three goals: to preserve this 350-year-old Vietnamese art form, to foster international cooperation through collaborative artistic creation and to expose a broad audience to nature’s greatest wonders through embroidery.

Than was born in Vietnam, where she worked in the family embroidery business. After the Vietnam War she emigrated to the United States to study fashion design and embark on a career in fashion and textile design. Gooberman is an environmentalist whose firm, Laurel Associates Inc., acquires environmentally sensitive lands for conservation organizations. “The textures of these embroideries bring us closer to the natural places they depict,” he says. “The mysterious stillness of forest shadows, the sudden bursts of light give the viewer the feeling of being in the wilderness.” The founders share an enthusiasm for Asian art that brought them together at art shows and events, often at the Asia Society in New York. The guiding concept that evolved is rooted in the founders’ conservationist and artistic backgrounds. Their concept was to create large-scale, one-of-a-kind embroideries of unsurpassed quality, building upon several historical precedents.

Gooberman admires Ansel Adams and his philosophy of “art in service of nature.” Inspired by the needlework renditions of works by 20th-century masters, including Picasso, Miró, Chagall, Klee, Calder, Kandinsky and Ernst, Gooberman and Than studied other collaborative embroidery that was being created in remote parts of the world. For example, the Italian conceptual artist Alighiero Boetti commissioned many of his paintings to be embroidered in Afghanistan, and the American photographer Robert Glenn Ketchum had a collection of his photography reproduced at the Suzhou Embroidery Research Institute in China.