Koi Fish Swimming Beneath Yellow Apricot Blossoms — Print & Oil Painting

Two worlds share one plane and no surface has been drawn between them. The branch is above, the fish are below, and there is no waterline, no glare and no ripple anywhere to say where air stops and water begins. The picture simply allows the two to overlap and trusts you to accept it.

The branch enters from the upper left, thick, black and knobbly, built up with heavy raised texture and flecked with gold, then forks into thin shoots that carry small five petalled yellow flowers packed along the wood. This is the flowering apricot, hoa mai, kept in southern Vietnamese homes for the lunar new year.

Eight or nine koi occupy the water and no two swim the same way. Most are white with red orange patches, one at the lower left is black and white, and their fins have been painted as translucent pale blue so the green of the water shows through them. Where a fin crosses a body the artist has let both remain visible.

The water is a flat green teal that lightens to pale jade at the top centre, directly behind the blossom, and that lightening is the only lighting effect the picture uses. Round lotus pads lie at the lower left and centre with one open pink flower and a bud among them.

Saturation measures moderate against a low value with the hue reading in the greens, which the teal ground fully accounts for. The design belongs to a long decorative tradition in which fish and blossom together stand for abundance and for the turn of the year, and it has been arranged for balance rather than observed at a pond. Part of our Vietnam collection, alongside koi rippling a dark pond ringed with white water lilies and a branch of red blossoms in ink and watercolour style.