8. 8AR Vu Cao Dam (French-Vietnamese, 1908-2000) Nude 1941 signed and dated Vu Cao Dam 1941 and in Chinese (top right) ink and colour on silk 60 x 46 cm (23 5/8 x 18 1/8 in) Provenance Private collection, France. The work has been authenticated by Yannick Vu-Jakober, daughter of Vu Cao Dam. According to her, the frame may have been made by the artist. LE SILENCE DU CORPS - NGÔ KIM-KHÔI Posed in the muted half-light of a dream, the female body painted by Vu Cao Dam in 1941 seems to curl up outside time, between evanescence and matter. On fine silk, delicately impregnated with ink and powdery colours, the Vietnamese painter composes a hymn to the silence of the nude - a silent but vibrant song, nourished both by Far Eastern tradition and by the French modernity that the artist had been working with for nearly a decade in Paris. The model, seated with her arms folded over her forehead in a gesture of abandoned modesty, appears to be asleep in her own flesh. The face, lightly touched, almost blurred, seems to merge with the dark hair, itself lost in a cameo of blues and deep blacks. The body, meanwhile, stands out with an almost unreal softness, sculpted by highlights of pale yellow, milky ochre and a few ashen shadows. As an ancient Vietnamese proverb says: "Silence is the word of the soul". And here, it is indeed the soul of the model, and perhaps also that of the painter, that we can make out beneath the transparencies of the silk. The left breast, marked in a discreet red and contained in a supple calligraphic line, draws the eye like a breathing point in this suspended composition. The silk, a living, moving medium, absorbs the ink with trembling capillarity. This technical choice is not insignificant: it recalls the art of Asian wash, but in a Westernised version. The ink spreads like a diffuse thought, impregnating the fabric without attacking it. The touches of colour, applied with an almost musical freedom, form a vibrant setting around the body, at once crushed by silence and charged with intimacy. An ancient verse by the poet Hồ Xuân Hương, free and sensual, could whisper in echo to this painting: "My body is both white and round, / tossed about by the ups and downs of fate". Therein lies the grace of Vu Cao Dam's model: in this oscillation between carnal presence and poetic effacement. We don't know whether we are witnessing the awakening or the disappearance of the subject - the background is so absorbing, caressing, sometimes erasing. Vu Cao Dam's work here combines the extreme refinement of oriental brushwork with the interiorised sensuality of modern nudes. The frame, which, according to his daughter Yannick Vu-Jakober, was made by Vu Cao Dam himself, gives the work the precious unity of a total object, thought through to the last detail. This Nude is not just the image of a body: it's an echo chamber for a sensibility that's close to the skin, a place of retreat where the human figure becomes the territory of painting. And if you listen carefully, you might think you can hear the ancient murmur of limpid silks and the more intimate sound of a brush brushing against silence.