This diptych works entirely within that tradition. Peonies, the flower of imperial honor, the bloom most closely associated with the Qing court, rendered in a Famille Rose palette of sovereign yellow and a blue that does not exist in nature. The Chinoiserie tradition has never been strictly botanical. It has always been an act of imagination, of European hands reaching toward a China they could only partially see.

Both panels executed in gouache on gold silk paper. 

In the Chinese painting tradition, to name a work after a sound is to reach deliberately beyond what the brush can touch. This diptych does not depict a bell, it depicts what surrounds the moment of sound: climbing roses ascending a sky blue ground, butterflies suspended mid-drift against stillness. A butterfly crossing light, a petal releasing from a climbing rose. A bell dissolving into air cannot. Both kinds of movement are painted into a single continuous surface, two long, lean panels, one yin and one yang, conceived as one painting and experienced as one unbroken vision.

Executed in gouache and acrylic on watercolor paper.

A Chinoiserie diptych in which Asian swallowtail butterflies move among flowering branches in a soft Famille Rose palette, the blush of a peony at first light, the warmth of aged silk, the ivory of an eggshell glaze. These are the colors that traveled west on Qing dynasty export porcelain, entered the European decorative imagination, and became the visual language through which the West learned to see China's botanical world as ornament.

Both panels are executed in gouache on gold silk paper. 

The Magnolia × soulangeana began in China. The Yulan magnolia, also known as Mulan Magnolia, white-flowering, ancient, cultivated in Buddhist temple gardens for centuries. It then traveled west through trade and botanical exchange, was crossed on French soil in the early nineteenth century, and emerged as the soft blush pink magnolia that now flowers across European gardens every spring. 

Both panels are executed in gouache on gold silk fabric in a soft blush palette drawn from the flower itself.

Yin and Yang, conceived as a single vision. In Chinese philosophy, these are not opposites but complementary forces, each one the other's completion. Collected together, the pair is whole. Collected separately, each carries the quiet knowledge that its other half exists.

Both panels are executed in gouache on gold silk paper.

In Chinese philosophy, nine represented infinity and extremity, the number at which the countable world ends and something larger begins. In the Chinoiserie tradition, butterflies carried the soul between worlds, appearing on painted surfaces across three centuries of European decorative imagination. Nine Souls in Flight holds both. Nine distinct butterflies on emerald silk, no flowers, no branches, nothing but wing and ground. Executed in gouache. Each one different. Nine, and everlasting.

Executed in gouache and acrylic on silk emerald paper.