Do Quang Em talks about what a good artist should try to achieve, but remains

A VIETNAMESE proverb says it is easy to draw a tiger if you just concentrate on skin and claws: the tough thing is to draw the tiger's spirit.

Vietnamese artist Do Quang Em adds a third level to the challenge: 'The really difficult thing is to put your feelings in there as well.' Em's work - showing at Galerie la Vong until the end of next month - is almost photorealistic: still lifes and portraits, where the apparent subject is draped in so many shadows that the real subject of the painting becomes the darkness itself.

Ask him what his art is about, however, and he refuses to say. 'I will have failed as an artist if I have to put it into words,' he insists through an interpreter.

'If the artist has to explain his art then it becomes meaningless,' he adds gloomily. I press him further. As a painter he uses oils, but interviewers have only words.

To everyone's surprise, as the conversation is entirely good-natured, we reach a sudden stalemate. It continues until the three of us leave the gallery and go outside for a cigarette. Then we smile, and Em says his concept is not of shadows, but of love: his love for his family, for Saigon and for life.

These paintings that are so very dark, are really about light, he says. 'If you want to see the brightness of a lamp, then you have to see it at night.' The elements of his pictures - an earth teapot, a luxury green silk scarf draped on a chair, autumn leaves, a model (always his wife or a daughter) looking very serious - are just the skin of our metaphorical beast, he says.