Empty Cyclo Parked by a Flower Shop Storefront — Print & Oil Painting

This image is a photograph, and what it records is a real vehicle standing in front of a painted wall. The street behind the cyclo is a mural: a flower shop, a run of tiled roofs, a village gate and a strip of blue sky, all painted flat onto a single surface. The cyclo itself is an object in the room, and the picture is the meeting of the two.

The join is visible and the photograph does not hide it. The painted ground runs down to a horizontal line about a fifth of the way up the frame, and below that line the real floor takes over as plain pale concrete, unpainted, catching a soft sheen from the light. A dry leaf or two lies on it. Where the mural shows a receding lane, the actual floor stays flat and continues toward the viewer.

The painted shopfront is the busiest part of the wall. Its fascia is lettered CUA HANG HOA and CAY CANH, with BAN BUON and BAN LE in smaller characters beneath, and behind the dark shuttered opening the interior is stacked with blooms in pink, yellow, blue and white. Terracotta pots crowd the pavement, a bank of yellow chrysanthemums stands in a grey tub, and bougainvillea in magenta pours down the wall at the far left. To the right a tiled gateway with an arched opening frames a green lane, and an orange flowering tree stands beside it.

The cyclo is unmistakably three dimensional. Its passenger bench carries a red vinyl cushion with a raised seam down the middle, the tubular frame and folded hood bars are black and lightly rusted, and the near wheel shows every spoke with the light catching along the rim. Its shadow falls onto the concrete behind it, soft edged and correctly placed, which no painted shadow in the mural does.

The seat is empty and nobody appears anywhere in the frame, painted or otherwise. The measured saturation is moderate against a middling value, which the strong mural colour and the neutral floor between them account for. From our Vietnam collection, near a weathered cyclo standing alone in an empty grey street and a flower cart beside a weathered wall with a green shutter.