In the composition Facsimile of Flowers, Peng Kanglong confronts us with two widely divergent experiences of space. In the extremely close foreground to the right, peonies and an early summer-flowering shrub—perhaps a wild dog rose—blossom before a jade green garden rock. To the immediately left of this arrangement, space recedes tens of miles into a misty canyon of blue stone. By adding an upright poppy on the far left and two peony blooms that bow into the very center of the composition, Peng heightens this tension in depth and distance between a garden—which we experience up front in relatively shallow depth—and a landscape—which we experience from afar with a sense of deep recession. This paradoxical juxtaposition, conflation, or mixing of extremely shallow and extremely deep recession is unique to Peng Kanglong’s flower-landscapes and extends the spatial possibilities afforded by traditional compositional methods such as the sanyuan or “Three Distances” inherited from Northern Song landscape composition.