Plants recur in Tu Hongtao’s recent works, shifting from anxious doll-and-crowd scenes expressing modern distress (“man and society,” “subject and others”) to abstract plant worlds where anxiety sinks into the undergrowth as foundation. He explores modern spiritual states: urban shock, intellectual alienation, spirit-material tension. Wild yet withered plants dominate, with ambiguous figures merging or marginalized, evoking isolation. Blending Western training and Chinese literati spirit, calligraphic lines structure flat scroll space, amplifying emotion over narrative. Rootless floating plants add surreal unease. Tu neutrally depicts release-repression conflict, moving beyond modernity toward human nature’s core.