Woman in Red Ao Dai Walking Through a Golden Reed Field — Print & Oil Painting

The measured contrast here is the lowest of anything in the collection, and the whole design depends on that flatness. A field of dry reeds fills the entire square, painted as thousands of fine vertical strokes in ochre, wheat and pale grey brown, running from the top edge to the bottom with no horizon, no sky and no change of scale to say how far back it goes.

Into that uniform surface two events have been set, and they balance one another across the width. On the right stands a woman in a red ao dai, seen from behind; on the left, at about the same height, a pale bird crosses the field with its wings out.

She is the larger of the two. Her dress is a flat clear red from the high collar to the calf, unmodelled and unbroken, worn over white trousers that dissolve into the reeds at the hem. A white conical hat sits square on her head, one arm is lifted slightly in front of her, and a heavy fall of black hair covers the whole of her back between hat and waist.

The bird is barely painted. Two pale angular wings, a small body and a pink note at the head, laid in with a few strokes only a shade lighter than the field it crosses, and it is easy to miss on first looking. Once found, it fixes the scale of everything else.

Nothing more is present: no path, no water, no building, no second figure. The picture is a texture, a red vertical and a pale horizontal, and it asks for nothing beyond that. It belongs to our Vietnam collection, near a red ao dai figure holding a single lotus in an empty gold field and four ao dai women cycling across a golden backdrop.