Woman in Ao Dai Holding a Book Amid Yellow Blossoms — Print & Oil Painting

One small blue rectangle is the only cool thing in this picture. Held against the chest and gripped in both hands, it is a book, and everything around it is red, gold, silver and black. That single cold note is what keeps the scheme from closing completely.

The ground behaves like lacquer rather than like paint. A deep crimson fills the whole surface behind her, mottled and faintly patterned where the layers have been rubbed back, and it reads as a solid material instead of as air. There is no sky, no wall, no floor and no horizon.

The hat takes the largest share of the light. It is a broad cone of chrome yellow with every rib ruled in as a fine radiating line, worn low and tipped forward, and from this angle it hides the face almost completely: only a small wedge of cheek and jaw survives beneath the brim.

Her ao dai is a pale silver grey with a metallic sheen and a few darker smudges worked into it, drawn as one long unbroken silhouette in profile, and her black hair falls in a solid mass down the back to below the waist. The figure is flat throughout and casts no shadow anywhere.

Yellow blossom crowds three sides of her: a large branch across the upper right, a smaller spray at the left, another low at the bottom left, each flower a five petalled yellow disc with a red centre on a thin green stem. The measured saturation is among the very highest in this group against a low value, which is exactly what gold flowers on a crimson lacquer ground will read. From our Vietnam collection, near koi fish swimming beneath yellow apricot blossoms and a woman in silver ao dai beneath red blossoms on gold leaf.