In Paths of Spring Flowers, Peng Kanglong employs his flower-landscape texture strokes to render not only the forms of his trees, flowers and grasses but also the light and space in which his subjects live and breathe. Normally in flower painting, this space is left "untouched" or "empty"—liubai and kongbai in classical parlance—but here, Peng fills this empty space with his dense, energetic brushwork. Paradoxically, his paintings still breathe, not with the emptiness of untouched paper but rather with the translucent, luminescent light of his dilute color-and-ink tones. To appreciate Peng's virtuosic brushwork, one must get very close to his works and immerse oneself in the intensity, spontaneity, discipline and utter freedom of his color, ink and line.