Born in Hanoi in 1920, Bui Xuan Phai became one of the last group of students to study at the École des beaux-arts de l’Indochine in Hanoi in the colonial period, from 1941-1946. As early as the 1950s, Phai had begun a prolific practice in portraiture, even though that genre was out of mainstream favour for ideological reasons. This work is a portrait of a young girl, painted in harmonious tones of grey, black and cream. While the face is rendered in minimal, simplistic blocks of colour, the artist has succeeded in giving the sitter an expressive and arresting gaze. This artwork was exhibited at Bui Xuan Phai’s first solo exhibition, in 1984. That exhibition was of immense historical significance for Vietnamese art, as one of a series of the first solo exhibitions in Hanoi since the 1945 revolution. These exhibitions recognised the modernist artists of the older generation, such as Bui Xuan Phai, Nguyen Sang and Nguyen Tu Nghiem, whose work had been marginalised in previous decades. Coming even before the official changes to economic and cultural policy in 1986 (Doi Moi), these landmark monographic exhibitions reflected the desire for cultural change, and generated significant discourse in the artistic community in Hanoi.
