Red Ao Dai Woman Holding a Single Lotus Flower — Print & Oil Painting

Emptiness is the subject and the figure is the exception to it. A golden ochre field fills the whole canvas, brushed in long horizontal sweeps that lighten toward the top and break into short upright grass strokes across the lower left and centre, and no horizon appears anywhere to say where ground ends and air begins.

One woman stands a little left of centre, turned away, and she is small enough that the space around her keeps the upper hand. Her ao dai is a hot scarlet, the only strong colour present, falling from a high collar to the calf over white trousers, and the paint in it is flat and even with barely any modelling.

She has raised one arm and holds a single lotus on a long thin stem up beside her head. The bud is closed, painted a deep rose pink with a darker point, and it is no larger than a thumbprint. That gesture is the entire narrative content of the work, and it has been given exactly enough room to register and not an inch more.

Her hat is a pale cone with a soft edge and her hair spills black beneath it onto the red. Gold, red, black and the white of the trousers are all the colours the picture uses. Saturation measures moderately high and brightness higher still, which is the profile of a canvas made almost entirely of light ochre. From our Vietnam collection, alongside a red ao dai figure among lotus leaves with two birds and a woman in red ao dai walking through a golden reed field.