Ye Yongqing shows his paintings of birds, flowers and landscapes at an ongoing solo exhibition in Beijing.[Photo provided to China Daily]

The peacocks were his companions, teaching him about life and art.

"They were narcissistic. They lived to show off their beauty and they died for it. In this respect they were quite like men," he says.

"The peacocks only care whether they are in limelight or not. They have no past and no future."

A graduate of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, Ye returned to Kunming to escape attention.

"Kunming is far away ... no one goes there for art," he says.

Then, in the following years he ran the Shanghe Guild and Chuangku Studio, hoping to settle there. He organized art exhibitions promoting overseas and home artists, such as Wang Guangyi, Zhou Chunya, Fang Lijun and Zeng Fanzhi. Their works had never been shown in Yunnan, and they were juxtaposed with the creations of local artists.

But Ye then came to see that Kunming was no longer the hometown he had been familiar with.

"I tried to communicate with people there and change their ways of thinking. But I found that their hearts and minds were like flagstones covered with moss from which one could harvest nothing.

"Though I was bathed in the brilliant sunshine (of Yunnan), I felt so weak."

Ye relocated to Beijing in 2004 to focus purely on art creation. In 2009 he opened a studio in Dali and it is during his annual stint there that he has finally sorted out his anxieties.