From mountains, to the sea.

Not a straight path, but a turning back. A daily practice of discipline. Huang Qiyou lives in Xiamen. He stays on the edge, not within. Outside, the city is smooth and polished. But inside, something rough remains: the slopes and ridges of the southern mountains, terraced hills and quiet, solid earth.

For Huang Qiyou, mountains are more than homesickness. They are a kind of hard ground, deep within his beliefs. His ancestors lived without ornament. Their quiet labor left its rhythm in his body— not as tradition, but as an inward hold. The sea, by contrast, stands for departure, movement, and absorption. It gives him the momentum to depart. He paints mountains and seas, not to remember, not to express. But to reshape how thought and action align. Somewhere between the two, he carves a path of his own: walked daily, like breath.

Huang Qiyou lives simply, with quiet order. He rises early, paints through the day, and walks or reads in the evening. In recent years, he has returned to Confucian texts, not as knowledge to master, nor answers to seek, but as companions in rhythm, folded into the way he lives and works. He was deeply influenced by Song dynasty painting in his early years. Over time, that influence has shifted—from visible references to something quieter, a tone that settles deeper in the work. What he paints is no longer the point. What matters is who he becomes, and how he approaches the act of painting. As the Zhongyong says, “The Way is not far from us. If it feels far, it is no longer the Way.”

Huang Qiyou is not concerned with tradition for its own sake. Rather, he uses it to stir something already present in the body: a native sense of form. The way his brush moves, the space he leaves, and the contours of mountains and sea all carry the same undercurrent. Looking at his work is like reading a sentence long forgotten: you may not recall the source, but the tone remains, made visible on the surface.