A woman is sewing. She's wearing a head scarf and traditional Chinese blouse, the lapel buttoned at the shoulder. She's pale, intense and contemplative. It's 1944, during the war with Japan and just before the civil war in China. What is she going through? What is she thinking? There's a letter sitting in a basket beside her. Is it from her husband, or her brother, or a soldier?
Pang Xunqin's painting The Letter is one of a number of works on show at London's Asia House. They form a unique display of Chinese art acquired over 65 years by Khoan and Michael Sullivan.
Professor Michael Sullivan is one of the foremost authorities on 20th-century Chinese painting. After studying architecture at Cambridge University, he went to China in the 1940s to work for the International Red Cross, driving medical supplies to hospitals in Free China.
He met his wife, Khoan, in Chongqing a few years later while he was teaching at the West China Union University Museum.
The collection they've amassed is a testament to their lifelong love of Chinese art, and to the friendships they built up with the artists themselves over a number of years, beginning in Sichuan in the mid-40s. Sullivan wrote in 2001, a year before his wife died: 'Khoan and I never set out to be collectors. In fact, it is only very recently that we have begun to consider ourselves as collectors at all - because other people said we were.'
The collection spans two generations, telling a story of social and political change as well as what was going on in the lives of the artists and the people and places they were painting.