Asano's Venus and Her Number One in a Landscape and A Woman with Beautiful Eyes take the same woman as their model, a sex worker in a relationship with a host.

In Venus and Her Number One in a Landscape, she reclines and holds out three ten-thousand-yen notes to a man with an adult's head on an infant's body. Her gaze is soft. In A Woman with Beautiful Eyes, the same face hardens slightly, and the spring flower once in her right hand has become a condom.

Both works rest on Palma il Vecchio, who painted a single model in two registers, as a goddess and as a portrait. When the same woman is given a mythological name, the exchange of sex and money is rewritten as romance. It is no different from a host club calling its female patrons "princess."

Asano takes the style on directly. The classical composition, the smooth surface. Only now Cupid is her "number one," and the arrow is a banknote. The picture stays beautiful while it shows who pays whom, and for what.

The two faces are not opposed. They are the face one woman turns to her host and the face she turns to a client. She lives on both sides of the exchange at once, the one who pays and the one who is paid. A soft gaze, and a hard one. What lies between them is painted nowhere on the canvas.