Grey Rainy Street Beneath the Bitexco Tower — Print & Oil Painting

This canvas has had its colour taken out of it. The saturation reading is the lowest of any work in this group by a wide margin, and the surface confirms it: white, bone, pale grey and a little charcoal, applied in long vertical drags that run down over buildings, sky and road without distinction. The city looks less painted than scraped, as though seen through a window in heavy rain.

The tower fills the centre and it has been left the least finished thing in the picture. It rises as a tall tapering wedge, wider at the base and narrowing as it climbs, its flank broken into vertical bands of grey blue with a lighter edge catching down one side. No floor lines, no windows, no crown. It is a silhouette given depth by tone alone.

Buildings crowd both edges and lean inward. The left bank is almost entirely white on white, one facade dissolving into the next with only a few dark window slots surviving. The right bank is heavier, carrying a balcony, a run of shopfronts and a large red sign board lettered in white, and that sign is the largest area of colour anywhere on the canvas.

Red does all the work of a much bigger palette. It appears in the sign, in four or five small upright marks standing in the road, in the striped bollards along the right pavement, and then again in the wet surface as short vertical smears directly beneath each source. Those repeated marks lead the eye from the bottom of the picture back to the base of the tower.

Traffic is minimal and deliberately so: a pale van at the centre right, a dark car further back at the left, a streetlamp arching over the road, and the broad bars of a crossing painted across the very bottom edge. From our Vietnam collection, near a grey monochrome view of an old market clock tower and a cyclist in red weaving through a grey Saigon alley.