Shanghai, Between Worlds (2026)

I went to Shanghai once and it never quite left me. This painting is my attempt to hold onto that feeling: half memory, half dream. The warmth of the lanterns, the mist between old and new, the quiet water holding both reflections at once. I painted the old temple in sharp detail, standing firm on its wooden stilts it doesn't dissolve, it doesn't fade. It's the root we all come from. The towers of the future, further away, are softer, less defined because the future is still being imagined, still uncertain and being built. Between them flows the river boats carrying small lights drift across it, like souls moving from the old world toward the new, carried by something steady beneath them. I didn't want to paint a city but to paint what it feels like to stand inside a place that dared to dream itself into being without ever letting go of where it came from.