Hu Bin’s essay examines Garden Tour (Youyuan 游园), a recent series by the painter Lin Ruixiang. The artist explains that she undertook a mental “garden tour” to soothe the “sense of decay that comes with spring”, a mood the author links to the lines on wasted youth in The Peony Pavilion. Rather than narrating this melancholy, the series recalls the literati practice of “travelling while lying down” (woyou) before landscape paintings. Built from circles and dots of varying density, her works weave misty, forest-like images that read as fragments yet, seen together, attain the grandeur of Song landscapes; holes and blank spaces, non-representational colour and poems written with deliberately incorrect characters add further layers between image and word. The author traces the series to her eight years of study in France and her cross-cultural reading: Roland Barthes, Shitao’s sayings on painting in Pierre Ryckmans’ annotated version, which she translated, Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, François Cheng, Plato’s theory of Ideas and the Buddhist view of dust and emptiness. Shitao’s “one-stroke” theory in particular guides her method of connecting marks. The essay concludes that her “garden tour” is an inner wandering that seeks growth between subject and object.