In this portrait, Thao Huynh builds a shallow, luminous field of greens that holds a single figure in áo dài and leaf hat. The polished lacquer surface compresses depth, guiding attention to contour, pattern, and the play of reflected light across layered resin, gold, and pigment. The lowered gaze and screened gesture stage intimacy rather than spectacle. This restraint aligns with Huynh’s broader practice, formed in southern Vietnam and refined through traditional lacquer techniques that require repeated coating, curing, wet sanding, and burnishing to reveal buried tones and metallic glints that seem to breathe as the viewer moves. These formal decisions tether cultural memory to a present tense image.

Placed in a wider art history, the painting’s emphasis on flat fields and decorative pattern invites comparison to the Nabi idea of painting as a “flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order,” where surface design overtakes illusionistic depth, as articulated by Maurice Denis and seen in Vuillard and Bonnard. The shimmering highlights also recall the symbolic and ornamental use of gold in Gustav Klimt’s Golden Phase, itself linked by scholars to Byzantine precedent and to the appeal of East Asian screens and lacquer that Klimt admired and collected. These parallels are persuasive because lacquer reflective strata operate like a living ornament, turning light into subject matter, much as Nabi textiles or Klimt’s gold do in their own media. Credible sources document the Nabi commitment to surface and pattern, Klimt’s gold and Byzantine or East Asian affinities, and the technical logic of lacquer’s layered polish in East Asia and Vietnam, including Vietnamese uses of metallic leaf and eggshell inlay that produce the optical depth evident here.