Women in Ao Dai Passing Flower Sellers on a Rainy Street — Print & Oil Painting

The canvas is divided into two groups that do not mix, and the gap between them is the subject. On the left, low down, two women sit on the ground with their flowers. On the right, upright and taller, four women in white stand together. One seated figure has turned and put out a hand toward the standing group, and that single reaching arm is the only thing crossing the space between them.

The sellers are painted in colour and close to the ground. One wears magenta over pale trousers with a wide straw hat, the other mustard yellow and green, and between them lie a flat basket of rose and crimson blooms and a loose heap of turquoise green stems. A large round basket sits empty at the far left edge.

The four standing women are painted almost entirely in white. Their ao dai fall in long unbroken vertical panels to the ankle, their conical hats overlap at slightly different heights, and their backs are turned. Only their dark hair and a few grey shadows in the folds separate one from the next. The last of them holds a bicycle at the right edge, its frame given as thin scratched lines.

Everything behind is an abstract wall. Cream, bone, olive and pale grey are scumbled and dragged across the upper half with a knife, worked into a broken texture with no window, roof or edge anywhere in it. The painter has refused to build a street, and the figures simply stand in front of a surface.

Fine rain runs down the whole canvas in pale vertical scratches, and the ground below returns the figures as long soft smears of white, red and gold. The measured saturation is among the lowest here, which a canvas of bone white and grey with two small colour patches will produce. From our Vietnam collection, near ao dai students walking through a misty grey haze and a cyclo driver crossing a flooded street in the rain.