In his series The Withered Blossoms, Peng Kanglong pursues pure flower painting in the intimate format of the album leaf. In No. 12 in the series, the artist works in a deep monochrome red. Peng renders his intimate portrait of a single peony bloom and a slender scholar’s rock with his his dense and energetic flower-landscape texture strokes. By modulating the density of his brushwork and the saturation of his monochrome reds, Peng evokes a sense of 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.