Wat Xieng Thong is the royal temple of the old Lao kingdom, and its rear gable is the surface everyone comes for: a red-ochre stucco wall into which hand-cut glass tesserae were pressed in 1957 to form a Tree of Life, with a whole village of small figures scattered under its branches.

This system takes that wall literally. The page ground is fired-brick stucco. Colour arrives as flat opaque chips — foliage green, peacock teal, cobalt violet — each with a seam and a single hard highlight, never a gradient. Gold is matte stencil leaf on lacquer, and structure steps downward the way the roof does, in three overlapping planes.