Yet, an inner unease weighed on his mind.

"I have a reserved personality, and it's more suitable to things back home, and I didn't know if I would be up for life in a big city," he says.

But he knew if he took one of the job offers, it would be likely that he would settle down in the big cities.

Interior designers have to work in one place to accumulate years of experience to develop a local clientele, he explains.

As he was torn between the two options, a local teacher in the village whom he had known during his internships called Tan to ask if he could return and become a teacher for primary and middle school students.

"Although the pay was about half of that in big cities, I knew it would be an opportunity closer to my heart," Tan says.

"I could return home and enjoy more room for my own art creation," he says, adding that he was also confident of being a good art teacher.

In 2015, Tan went back to Jingzhou after graduation and worked as an art teacher. In his spare time, he painted and explored other forms of art. In 2019, when he was seeking a breakthrough in his watercolor paintings, his school introduced a pottery class.

When he saw the pottery teacher molding and firing pottery, the idea of creating watercolor paintings on the pottery struck him.

"The pigment carries its original color when you put it on a piece of paper, but the color changes when you fire it for the pottery," he says.

That was when he embarked on a journey of integrating watercolor elements with pottery, which was a new world to him. At the beginning, Tan often botched his earthenware, most of which either collapsed or showed defects on the surface during firing.

"It was frustrating, when the watercolor patterns I took pains to paint were spoiled on the pottery items I made," he says.