Two Springs

There are two springs, five years apart and ten thousand kilometres away from each other.

The first was in 2021. After months of lockdown during the pandemic, I was finally able to travel again. I stayed for ten days in Tangxi, an old mountain village in Zhejiang, China, and painted eighteen oil paintings in one burst.

At that time, I was full of a burning energy. My thoughts moved freely and wildly. From a single peach blossom to branches, orchards, valleys, fantasy and abstraction, I wandered between reality and emotion. Peach blossoms were no longer flowers. They became a space that kept expanding — a space made of emotion, memory and imagination. Painting, for me then, was a way of placing myself in the world. The image was only a means. I was the centre.

On the tenth day, I suddenly felt lost. I no longer knew what peach blossoms really were.

At the end of 2024, I came to Malta. I was immediately drawn to the greenery here. I had never imagined that this island, famous for its fortresses and the sea, could hold such rich and beautiful plant life. Throughout the winter and spring, we kept hiking, exploring unknown places, wandering between blue skies, the Mediterranean, and fields of flowers.

Then, after May, everything suddenly disappeared. The
flowers and green fields turned into dry yellow earth under the blazing sun. It felt as if spring had only been a dream. So I decided to paint wild flowers.

At first, I thought it was simply another spring. Later, I realized it was not.

Peach blossoms are grand. They bloom in abundance, filling valleys, filling the eye, and filling my emotions.

Wild flowers are the opposite. They grow in cracks of limestone, on cliffs, beneath old stone walls, and in abandoned places. Some are so small that they almost touch the ground. Some bloom for only a few days each year. Some can only be found if you crouch down and loo carefully. I could no longer enter them as I once entered the peach blossoms.

I could only stop.

I learned their names, remembered where and when they appeared, photographed them, and returned home to paint them one by one on my iPad.

From October 2025 to June 2026, I painted sixty wild flowers. Much slower than I had expected, and slower and slower as time wen
on. Besides painting itself, much more time was spent walking, searching, observing and trying to understand. I enlarged them, looked closely, and looked again. I tried to understand their structures, their colours, and the environments
in which they lived.

As I looked closer and closer, I felt a whole world slowly unfolding before me — full of order, variation, and unexpected beauty.

Gradually, I realised that painting is not always about turning the world into something I want it to be. Sometimes, it simply teaches a person to crouch quietly in front of a small flower, and to recognise another kind of truth in the world.