Three Ao Dai Women, One in Red, Carrying White Flowers — Print & Oil Painting

The ground is a flat warm cream and two of the three women wear white, so they are perpetually on the point of vanishing into it. Their contours are soft and half dissolved, and in places dress and background share the same value with only a faint grey seam between them. The artist is working at the exact limit where a figure stops being visible.

Only the woman on the left is anchored. Her ao dai is a hot orange red, the sole saturated colour anywhere on the canvas, and it holds the eye so firmly that the two pale figures beside her can afford to be as insubstantial as they are. She stands a little apart from them with one arm raised and bent so that her hand comes up near her face.

All three are seen from behind under white conical hats, and those hats are the most solid shapes in the picture, each a clean triangle with a firm lower edge. Below them the hair falls in dark masses down the back, and the two darks, hat and hair, set up the rhythm of the whole design: light, dark, light, dark, three times across the width.

Low between the figures sits a terracotta pot holding a spray of small white blossom and dark green leaves. The title has the flowers carried, but what the picture shows is a pot standing on the ground with a hand reaching down toward it, which is a quieter and more particular moment. No floor, no wall and no horizon appear anywhere. From our Vietnam collection, alongside three women in pink and red with their dresses billowing and a collage style figure in ao dai holding white blossoms.