Name: Bunnies & Peonies
Brand: My Store 2
Availability: InStock

A whimsical illustrated scene with white rabbits, pink peony flowers, a blue-and-white ceramic vase, butterflies, and a colorful bird on a pale aqua background with botanical vines.

Bunnies and Peonies imagines a quiet sanctuary where beauty, gentleness and stillness come together. Set against a hand-painted floral backdrop inspired by Chinese decorative wallpapers, the painting combines an imagined interior with a peaceful still life inhabited by three rabbits. Although rich in colour and ornament, its true subject is not decoration, but the feeling of finding a place where the outside world momentarily fades away.

Rather than depicting a real room or garden, the painting creates a personal refuge. It invites viewers to linger, to look closely, and to experience the quiet pleasure of inhabiting a space where time slows and beauty becomes a form of comfort.

Created during the Year of the Rabbit, Bunnies and Peonies grew from a desire to continue exploring symbolic animals while moving beyond the celebratory approach of earlier works. The rabbits provided the starting point, but the painting gradually evolved into something more personal.

For many years I had wanted to create a painting inspired by the atmosphere of historic chinoiserie wallpapers. Instead of treating the wallpaper as a decorative backdrop, I imagined it as an entire world in itself, filled with peonies, birds, butterflies and flowering plants that blur the boundary between interior decoration and nature.

The foreground developed separately. A blue and white porcelain vase filled with freshly gathered peonies sits on a wooden table alongside three rabbits, each quietly occupying the space in its own way. Together they create the sense of an inhabited home rather than a formal still life.

Although the imagery bears little visual resemblance to the classical gardens of Suzhou where I grew up, the painting is deeply connected to the feeling those places left behind. I remember the quiet corners of old houses and gardens during the humid plum rain season, where the world outside felt heavy and restless while sheltered spaces remained cool, peaceful and still. Sitting quietly, listening to the rain or gentle music, those moments became places of calm within everyday life.

Rather than recreating those memories literally, Bunnies and Peonies transforms them into an imagined interior where that same sense of refuge can exist through a different visual language.

Bunnies and Peonies explores the human desire to create places of refuge.

Rather than imagining a perfect world on a grand scale, the painting asks a quieter question:

What kind of place allows us to feel truly at peace?

Its answer is not found through realism, but through imagination. Chinese decorative traditions, European domestic interiors, peonies, porcelain and gentle animals coexist within a single space that could never exist in reality, yet feels emotionally familiar. The painting suggests that sanctuary is less about geography than about the emotional environments we build for ourselves through memory, beauty and imagination.

The painting is built upon layers, both physically and conceptually.

The hand-painted floral background functions like an imagined wallpaper, creating a world that sits somewhere between architecture, decoration and landscape. In front of it, the still life and rabbits occupy another layer of space, inviting the viewer into a more intimate domestic setting.

These worlds are united not through narrative but through atmosphere. The abundance of flowers and ornaments contrasts with the restrained simplicity often associated with the classical gardens that inspired its emotional foundation. Rather than reproducing those places, the painting translates their sense of quiet contemplation into a richer, more exuberant visual language.

The rabbits quietly reinforce this atmosphere. They neither perform nor symbolise a specific story. Instead, they simply belong within this peaceful world, embodying gentleness, curiosity and ease.

Together, these elements suggest that peace is not always found by escaping reality, but by creating small corners where beauty allows us to pause, breathe and simply be.

The painting combines two distinct painting traditions within a single work. The background was created using ink and mineral pigments on rice paper, developing an intricate floral composition inspired by the richness of hand-painted chinoiserie wallpapers. The foreground still life, including the rabbits, vase and peonies, was then painted in oil onto the front surface of thick toughened glass.

This unusual construction unexpectedly introduced a further layer to the work. The thickness of the glass causes the painted foreground to cast real shadows onto the floral background when illuminated, extending the still life into the imagined space behind it. Although this optical effect was discovered rather than planned, it became an integral part of the finished piece, gently dissolving the boundary between physical space and painted illusion.

The painted frame continues the floral imagery beyond the picture itself, allowing the imagined world to extend beyond the edge of the composition.