Why I paint cities I'm leaving

I’m writing this from a half-empty studio in Taipei. There are tape outlines on the floor where the easel used to live. The watercolor box is the only thing I haven’t packed, because tomorrow morning I’m meeting a friend on a balcony in Da’an and I told her I’d bring it.

In a few weeks we leave for Vancouver.

This is the third time in a decade I’ve packed a studio for a new country. Hong Kong, then Taipei, now Vancouver. Every time, the same small panic — that the work won’t follow me, that the next city won’t paint as well as the last one. And every time, the same small surprise — that it always does.

What watercolor keeps

Photographs are honest about facts. They tell you what colour the sky was, where the trams ran, which café had the awning out.

But watercolor is honest about the other thing — what the moment felt like. Watercolor remembers slowness. It remembers being tired. It remembers the third cup of coffee, the conversation with the owner, the cat on the next balcony, the smell of rain that didn’t quite arrive.

When I leave a city, I don’t paint it from photos. I paint it from the feeling that’s still in the brush.

The Lviv painting, for example

I started this painting in Lviv, in 2019, from a café window. I finished it in Taipei, in 2024, from memory — five years of the rooftops sitting somewhere in my head, getting more honey-coloured every year, until the painting that came out wasn’t really Lviv anymore. It was the way I remember Lviv.

That’s the thing I’m trying to keep doing. Not painting cities I just left, but cities I’m still leaving — slowly, over years, in pieces.

What I’m doing in Vancouver

The first painting in the new studio is going to be Hong Kong. Of course it is. You always paint the city you grew up in last. It takes a while to be far enough away.

Then Stanley Park, probably. There’s a black-and-white postcard of the totems on Etsy — that one I painted on a visit a few years ago, before this move was even a plan. Vancouver has been on the list for a long time.

After that, whatever the new neighbourhood asks for. Some street, some café, some balcony I haven’t seen yet.

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