About Us

I’m Sammy. From the time I started learning sketching and oil painting in fourth grade to formally studying advertising design at the School of Visual Arts in New York, all I ever wanted was to do things that brought me a little closer to beauty. Over four years of college, I noticed that compared with Asian students, my classmates from Europe and America were far less constrained in their work — they could always surprise you, and they dared to imagine and dared to act. I realized this huge difference had nothing to do with genes; it came from the environment, culture and education they grew up with.

After several busy years of working back in China, I finally decided to press pause at the beginning of 2019. Throughout that year, between meditation, reading, yoga and travel, I spent much of my time with my two-and-a-half-year-old goddaughter. I took her to playgrounds, and we went to classes together at an arts education center. At home we put on music and danced freely, with no rules; we also carried a long roll of white paper to the park, spread it out on the lawn and dodged the groundskeeper who tried to shoo us away — all so she could freely try out how paint and lines collide in the middle of nature.

It was this most instinctive kind of play with her that let me observe children up close. They are actually very sensitive to their surroundings and clearly pick up the signals a space sends. In a fully relaxed atmosphere, with adults who are tolerant, their already powerful life force can begin to flow. No rules, no right or wrong — just honestly turning what the five senses take in into lines, colors, dance steps and songs. These free and raw creations are often more wonderful than the work of adults who graduated from art academies.

Over the past year, I sat in on classes many times at several well-known early-childhood arts education centers, and found that most of them treat art like tutoring in math, physics or chemistry: show a picture, tell a story, but in the end the task is still to copy or imitate. It reminded me of when I was little and the teacher asked everyone to draw their home: it looked as if my classmates and I all lived under the same roof — every house had a triangle roof on a square base, with the same four-pane windows. Again and again we were drilled in fixed ways of expressing ourselves, until we grew into ordinary adults.

I don’t want to quote classics or authorities to explain how I understand education, children or beauty. Our closeness to beauty is an instinct — like longing for freedom, like loving and being loved. I’m a single woman who has never had children, but precisely because of that, what I see is not some mother’s special child, but humanity’s children: people who have every right to become themselves.

Belief matters more than knowledge, feeling more than standards, experience more than results. That is why, in the precarious year of 2020, I found the courage to build from scratch a children’s space free from the influence of any school of thought or doctrine. Sometimes 0 is even more beautiful than 1, because it holds more possibilities.

Forget every word I’ve said. Just come with me — to feel, and to believe.