This painting series is inspired by French Expressionist painter Henri Matisse — his color, compositions, and focus on female subjects. Matisse’s Odalisque paintings, while brilliant works of art, largely exploits women (especially sex workers) of then-French colonies in North Africa. As a Vietnamese artist whose country was once a French colony, I want to reclaim these spaces, these interiors, these bodies. What’s shown below are not rooms of a French colonizer, they are rooms of the women.

Illustration.