In the space between

A few days ago, I received a message from a collector who had recently acquired one of my paintings, Young Love, at The Other Art Fair in Dallas. His words stayed with me.

He shared that what drew him to the piece — beyond its soft textures and fluid cloud forms — was a subtle but deep connection it seemed to make between traditional Chinese landscape painting and a more Western abstract sensibility. He explained that one of his main interests as a collector is finding works that build bridges between these worlds. And in Young Love, he saw a resonance with childhood memories of Huangshan — the iconic Chinese mountain range where peaks rise above a sea of clouds like ancient ink wash dreams.

Curious, I looked up images of Huangshan. I was genuinely moved. The atmosphere — quiet, floating, serene — felt almost like a visual echo of what I had tried to express in that painting: a place where form becomes feeling, and where stillness is charged with emotion.

What touched me even more was realizing that although I hadn’t intentionally set out to fuse East and West, this connection is something I’ve been slowly circling around in my work and is becoming more and more a substantial part of my growth as an artist. Not in a formal or academic way, but intuitively. Through mood, texture, and symbolism. I often paint moments of transition — clouds, mist, water, fading light — and I realize now how often those liminal spaces serve as a shared language between cultures. There’s something universal in the way we respond to nature’s softness, ambiguity, and mystery.

This exchange helped me see more clearly how my own aesthetic is evolving. I’m becoming increasingly interested in finding emotional and visual common ground between Eastern and Western traditions — not through direct references, but through shared atmospheres and inner states. Through softness, space, rhythm, and silence.

Because in the end, art can be a conversation across time and geography. A way of saying: I’ve felt this too.