In the 1980s, Chinese higher art institutions faced an extreme scarcity of literature on foreign fine arts. I once traveled to libraries in Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, collecting information by manually transcribing data onto index cards. Throughout my three years of postgraduate studies, I accumulated nearly thirty thousand such cards, laying the groundwork for subsequent teaching and research. What today can be easily resolved with a smartphone then relied on extensive library searches and the meticulous transcription of one card at a time. Over the decade from 1979 to 1988, alongside my studies and teaching at Nanjing Arts Institute, I managed to compile nearly ten monographs. Whenever the night grew quiet, I would be at my desk, engrossed in writing. In this brief span of ten years, I left behind manuscripts totaling five to six million words. At times, constrained by financial constraints, I had to seek assistance even for obtaining writing paper. There were instances when I became accustomed to densely filling a single A4-sized sheet with thousands of minuscule characters, rendering it indecipherable to others.