What Chen Yifei Taught Me at 8 p.m.

It was already dark when we arrived at the Museum of Art Pudong. The air outside carried that quiet hum that only cities like Shanghai have — a mixture of neon, river wind, and a strange kind of expectation. We weren’t looking for anything in particular. Maybe that’s why we found something that stayed with me.

We wandered through the museum almost by instinct. The temporary exhibitions were what had drawn us there, yet as we moved between rooms, something shifted. On the fourth floor, the light softened, and a single name caught my eye: Chen Yifei.

I didn’t know who he was. Not then. But there was something magnetic about that room — the calm, the muted tones, the way each canvas seemed to hold its breath.

His paintings unfolded like fragments of a memory: mist over canals, narrow stone bridges, women in silk caught between elegance and melancholy. His Water Town series, inspired by his native Zhejiang, felt less like a place and more like an echo. He painted home as if it were a dream he was trying not to forget. There was precision, yes, but also tenderness — the kind of devotion that comes from doing something purely for the love of it.

The exhibition ended with a single phrase on the wall:

“People always have infinite dreams and hopes, yet with finite time and abilities. Therefore, I’ve decided to focus solely on what truly matters to me — and to perfect it.”

I read it once, then again, as if the words were settling into me slowly.

Later that night, over dinner, I kept thinking about it. Somewhere between one bite and the next, I realized that Chen Yifei had been doing exactly what I’ve always wanted to learn to do: create not out of obligation, but out of passion. Paint, write, live — simply because it brings you closer to yourself.

He didn’t paint for recognition. He painted what he loved: his hometown, his memories, the light that fell over familiar places. It wasn’t ambition that guided him, but affection.

And maybe that’s the real secret of mastery. To return, again and again, to what you love most, until it becomes a kind of truth.

That night I left the museum thinking I had seen paintings. By the time dinner was over, I understood I had witnessed conviction. The quiet, unshakable kind that only exists when passion meets patience.

Since then, I’ve written his name on my list of places to go — not the man, but the place he couldn’t stop painting. I want to see those canals, that light, that silence he carried onto his canvases. Maybe then I’ll understand what he meant when he chose not to chase every dream, but to perfect just one.