In 2023, I asked a simple question: If your experience of quarantine had a color, what would it be?

I expected people to answer with just colors. But, they answered with their lives.

More than seventy people anonymously shared the colors they associated with quarantine. Their responses rarely stopped at naming a color. They wrote about cancelled plans, empty streets, arguments with family, unexpected moments of quiet, spring arriving outside the window, and the loneliness of not being able to see friends.

One participant chose grey because the city felt covered in fog.
Another chose black because they could no longer see hope.
Someone chose yellow because quarantine could not stop spring from arriving.
Another described green through the color of a health code, a color that represented safety while life itself still felt uncertain.

I had imagined I was collecting colors. What I was actually collecting were fragments of relationships.
Relationships interrupted.
Relationships stretched across distance.
Relationships with parents, roommates, classmates, cities, and with oneself.
Although none of the participants knew one another, I found myself reading their responses as if they were quietly speaking across the same page.

Their colors were different. Their emotions were different. Yet they all described the same moment in history.

As I continued reading the responses, I realized that no single color could represent quarantine. I began collecting everyday objects that resonated with the colors and descriptions participants shared. Trees, yellow blossoms, healthcare workers in protective suits, green health codes, face masks, cloudy skies, and patches of blue sky gradually found their way into a series of collages. These ordinary images became visual fragments of a shared period of uncertainty. Each object carried traces of ordinary experiences during the pandemic and reflected different emotions expressed in the responses.

Figure 1: Digital College, Yuqing, 2023

Notes: Fragments of healthcare workers, health codes, yellow blossoms, masks, cloudy skies, blue skies, and everyday life were assembled into collages that reflected participants' responses.

The collages became a space where individual stories could exist alongside one another. From these collages, I extracted color palettes and developed a series of digital paintings titled Connection. The paintings brought colors from different participants into the same visual space. Individual palettes blended, shapes overlapped, and colors drawn from separate collages gradually shared the same surface.

Looking back, I realized that the artworks became a way of exploring how separate experiences could coexist while remaining distinct. The title Connection reflects this process, bringing together fragments of many lives into a shared visual landscape. Not because everyone experienced quarantine in the same way. Every response remained different.
Some participants described fear.
Others described relief.
Some felt trapped.
Others discovered moments of stillness they had never experienced before.

Figure 2: Series of digital painting, Yuqing, 2023

Notes: Colors extracted from the collages gradually came together in a shared visual landscape.

I never met the people who answered. I only knew the color. Yet while reading their words, extracting colors, and assembling the paintings, I found myself carrying small fragments of seventy different lives.

The project changed my understanding of connection. I had assumed that connection depended on proximity, that people needed to meet, speak, or share physical space.

During quarantine, that was often impossible. However, the connection still appeared. It appeared through anonymous sentences.
Through colors.
Through ordinary objects.
Through the slow process of making.
The paintings do not represent seventy people.
They represent what happened between their responses.
The spaces where one person's grey quietly met another person's yellow.
Where fear existed beside hope.
Where isolation unexpectedly became collective.
Perhaps connection is not the opposite of distance.
Perhaps it is something we continue making, even when we cannot be together.
I thought I was collecting colors.
In the end, I realized I had been collecting a shared moment that no one could experience alone.