Illustrated Woman in Ao Dai Beside a Birdcage Under the Moon — Print & Oil Painting

This is a drawing on toned paper and it uses very little of it. A wide expanse of warm beige is left completely bare across the middle and the right of the sheet, and every mark in the picture is pushed out to the figure, to one corner and to a single disc in the sky.

The bamboo is pure ink. A spray of it enters at the top left, the stems drawn as short segmented strokes and the leaves as long pointed marks loaded at one end and dry at the other, laid down in the manner of brush calligraphy with no correction anywhere in them.

The moon is a plain white disc at the upper right with a soft grey wash brushed around one side of it. Nothing else occupies the sky, and because the paper is warm rather than dark, the night has to be inferred from that one shape alone.

She stands at the centre in a white ao dai drawn with a few long contour lines and almost no shading, the panels swinging out to the right in two clean curves. Her conical hat is the brightest invention here: a yellow green cone with its ribs ruled in as a fine grid and three small red tassels hanging from the brim. A dark plait falls in front of the shoulder.

Both hands rest on the arched hoop handle of a birdcage standing in front of her on a slim stand. The cage is a dome of finely crosshatched bars in grey ink, and at its foot sits a small block of pure red, the only other red in the sheet. Her shadow is a single grey smudge on the ground. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near an abstract line sketch of overlapping ao dai figures and a branch of red blossoms in ink and watercolour style.