Vladimir Tretchikoff painted Chinese Girl in 1952. The subject was a young Chinese-South African woman named Monika Sing-Lee, whom Tretchikoff had met in Cape Town. He painted her with blue-green skin, in a blue-green robe, against a dark background, with an expression of complete self-possession. The painting was reproduced as a print and sold in enormous quantities — by some estimates, more widely distributed than any other single painted image in the mid-twentieth century.
Serious art history mostly ignored it. The painting was commercially successful, which in the critical framework of the time was a mark against it. "Kitsch" was the word critics used. The subject was beautiful and the painting was appealing to people who didn't have opinions about what appealed to them, which was precisely the problem from the perspective of critics who were trying to maintain a distinction between art and popular decoration.
Tretchikoff came to the painting through an extraordinary personal history: born in Siberia, grew up in Kazakhstan, fled the Russian Revolution, worked as a commercial artist in Singapore, survived being stranded on a raft after a Japanese attack, spent years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java, made his way to South Africa after the war ended. He painted what he found striking without much reference to what the critical establishment considered significant.
Chinese Girl's expression is the relevant competitive detail. She is looking at something outside the frame. Her expression is composed, unreadable, slightly ahead of wherever the viewer is. In a Rock Paper Scissors context, this is the expression you want across the table from you — not because it tells you something, but because the effort to read it teaches you about the limits of reading.