NICK YIN

In the dog days of summer, Yiyang’s sun presses straight down on your skull, so harsh you can only squint into the light. The air becomes a giant steamer; open the door and a wave of heat pushes you back, searing your skin. My hometown’s summers have always lived in my memory as a haze of dizziness—streets nearly empty, silence so deep it rings in your ears. Along the embankment of the Zi River, weeds and grasses stretch across the slope. Their leaves are no longer green, but coated evenly in...

Autumn has slipped away. Returning to my blog drafts, I found an essay that should have been finished in summer and somehow dragged its feet all the way into early winter. My procrastination is clearly in its advanced stage. Still, I should sit down and finish it—let writing become a habit, a small act of self-care against the quiet erosion of age. Toronto’s summers are never oppressively hot. The air is almost unreal in its clarity—everything you see looks as if a contrast filter has been...

This is a lotus pond I finished a few summers ago. Most of the time, I would use color to express such scenery, but this time what touched me more was not the color, but the shape of the dense lotus leaves in the pond. They are large and small, overlapping each other, depending on each other, vying to grow upwards and compete for the sunlight. After I finished the painting, it really touched a friend, and she bought it to hang in her home.