Unexpectedly, the COVID-19 in 2020 made the second semester of my junior year in university become the last semester to communicate with my teachers and classmates face to face. At that time, I planned to hold a solo exhibition in uni as a summary of my undergraduate study. The most I worried about was to failed to let the audience empathize with my creations. After struggling for a period, I painted this work, including all my teachers’ and classmates' portraits. Since people in the university know each other well, and the audiences of my exhibition were mainly people on campus, I thought, at least, this work may surprise most of my viewers to some extent when they find the faces of themselves or somebody they know in this work without any preparation.

        Although compared to the later works like the the “Together” series, this painting is relatively rough in the details, for me, it is a new beginning. Just like the “Red, Yellow, and Blue” series, it brought me a lot of new ideas and gave me a new direction. Also, the scale is larger than any work I made before. Since then, for a long time, I have lost interest in creating smaller works and kept the scale of my pieces around this size. Of course, I have also thought about painting larger. However, the door of the studio does not allow me to do this.