Winter and Spring

It has been really cold recently, but I remember spring being here: the trees were blossoming. Perhaps it’s not winter that’s lingering, but spring that’s left.

The Return of the Lucky Cookie

The Lucky Cookie series, which I started between late 2020 and early 2021, was never truly finished. I always knew I would return to it because I like the idea very much: it acts as a tiny, crunchy shield. It says the things I am too shy to say out loud. If any truths were being told here, it is the cookies speaking—not me. It takes all the credit (and the blame); I am merely the messenger.
But for five years, the cookies remained silent. Until today.
It was sunny yesterday. I really wanted to go out, but at the same time, there are so many things I genuinely enjoy doing that require me to stay at home. I finally made it outside around 4 pm. It was lovely, but fifty sneezes later, I was back indoors.
Lucky me! I now have the perfect excuse not to fight with the sun and to stay at home in peace. In the background, a voice spoke loudly to me: “It is sunny outside, but your 99 hobbies demand you to stay at home.” It seems the cookie fairies finally had something to say.

Some Apples

Good Advice & Something else

The loudest advice rarely comes from care. It usually comes from anxiety.

Some people feel an urgent need to fill the space around them. They speak quickly, confidently, and at great length about what you should do. But very often, it has little to do with you.

Unsolicited advice can be a disguise for something else: the fear of becoming irrelevant, the quiet sting of envy, or the uneasy feeling that the world has moved on without them. Words become a shield. If they keep talking, they don’t have to listen. If they keep explaining, they don’t have to face their own uncertainty.

Real advice works differently.

It begins with listening. It allows silence. It makes room for the shape of your experience before offering anything in return.

In a world full of noise, good advice rarely takes up much space.

Woke Up

The original idea was a simple structure:

Last night,

In her dream,

__________,

Then she woke up.

The sentence in the middle could be anything. I chose to keep the comic almost non-interpretable. The specific content of the dream isn’t the point—it is merely something that existed for a moment before the waking world took over.

Perhaps you’d like to fill in the blank with your own experience?

For example:

Last night, in his dream, she came back, then he woke up.

Last night, in my dream, there was a delicious pie in front of me, then I woke up.

Last night, in his dream, he hired a bear, then he woke up.

Sunrise, Sunset, and the “Efficient Laziness”

This year, I started experimenting with lino-cutting. I wanted to work with my hands, to feel the physical resistance of the material, and to experience the printing process directly.

But as soon as I carved my first plate and made a few prints (not these ones), a “plan” appeared in my mind. I realized I could use a single block to create a multi-frame narrative: the same printed image could repeat in every frame, while another element moves through them.

I have to confess—this idea probably came from laziness. Isn’t that a contradiction? I want to work with my hands, and at the same time, I want to be efficient.

The first moving element that came to me felt natural: the sun. It is the largest thing I experience moving across my world every day. And what could remain unchanged in every frame? Without doubt, the mountains.

Initially, I planned a five-frame sequence: the sun slowly rising from the left, climbing over the mountains, and eventually setting on the right.

After printing two five-frame versions—using one plate to repeat the landscape and then hand-painting the sun in each frame—I realized something: I could also reduce it to just two frames.

The five frames exaggerate slowness. They insist on duration.
The two frames feel more philosophical. Everything in between is implied. 

I am very happy with both results.

The Untranslatable Mist

This piece began as a short poem I wrote in Chinese years ago about the nature of mist (雾):

雾

我看见的雾

总在我永远也达不到的前方

其实

我正在雾里1

Last year, when I tried to translate it into English, the words felt like they were losing their magic. In Chinese, the character 雾 (wù) has the radical “雨” (rain) at the top, above the phonetic element “务”, creating a visual density and a specific poetic weight that English words like “mist” or “fog” just can’t replicate. The character itself looks like the atmosphere it describes.

While I was stuck on the translation, I suddenly “saw” these images in my head. I realized that if I couldn’t translate the words, I could translate the poem’s feeling and the logic into pictures.

In the end, I was much happier with these drawings than I was with my English drafts of the poem. Sometimes, when words fail, pictures are another way to speak.

1

The direct (literal) translation of the poem:

Mist

The mist I see

Is always ahead, where I can never reach.

Actually,

I am already in the mist.