Homage to In the Mood for Love: The Cheongsam Back View

Medium: Mixed media (digital crayon brush, custom aluminum pen, Chromatico paper collage, oil pastel)

Subject: An homage to In the Mood for Love, depicting the back view of a woman in a red cheongsam

Theme: Memories of time, distance, and color; the hidden temperature of love and isolation

Artist: Visual Story Artist Kazue Shima

In the Mood for Love is, to me, a film about time, distance, and color.

The recurring step-printed slow motion carries a persistent beauty — as if longing clings physically to a place. I read it as a form of love that wants to hold time still. This is not a love declared in open space, but one felt only in the breath exchanged during a passing moment. Cramped, shared apartments. The watchful eyes of neighbors. A moral climate that made distance itself unbearably intimate. All of it sharpens that closeness into something almost unbearable.

And above all, this film is defined by red. Not one red, but many — the film moves through shades I can only fully name in Japanese, a language with words for red that English does not carry in the same way. I am drawn to this: my own language holds a vocabulary for color that I don’t think I could replace.

This is a reinterpretation, an homage — not a reproduction of the original story or its dialogue, but a translation of what the film left in me: a feeling of time, distance, and color, redrawn through my own hand. The finished piece uses the pop, textured technique built around a discontinued crayon, but getting there involved testing several methods — cutting the film’s title from garnet-colored paper and layering it over an ink brush drawing, laying red paper behind a pencil drawing of the couple and adding a cut-paper flower.

Whatever the material, whatever the technique, what I kept returning to was her back — always walking after him, never facing forward. Whether this is a love story, a story of an era, a woman’s love, or a man’s want, I may never know. That is exactly why I think I will keep watching this film again and again.

Drawn in aluminum pen and sumi ink. After completing the figure’s outline, I cut the film’s title from garnet-colored paper and layered it over the drawing. Choosing to cut and place the letters, rather than draw them, was a way of leaving the homage as a physical trace within the piece itself.

A pencil drawing of the couple, seated back-to-back, set against a sheet of red Cromatico paper. The flower motif was painted separately and cut out before being added to the composition — a motif that echoes the patterns found on qipao dresses, reconstructing the link between color and emotion as a flat paper collage.

Made after seeing the film again at a 2026 anniversary screening in Tokyo. Red oil pastel is layered over the black outline drawn with my own hand-made aluminum pen — an attempt to render, in color, the particular loneliness of being surrounded by people yet still apart.