Tucked behind the gray-brick facades of Beijing's Dafangjia hutong (alleyway), a heavy wooden door opens into stillness. Inside Under Clouds Green, a plant-based Yunnan cuisine restaurant, the city's noise dissolves almost instantly.
In the courtyard, a century-old jujube tree rises through the building toward the sky, while a red rammed-earth wall from Jianchuan, Yunnan province, catches the light, quietly anchoring the space in another landscape.
It is here, between north and southwest, structure and wilderness, that an unusual collaboration takes shape.
Titled Five Walks with Plants, the project brings together a 34-year-old chef from the Bai ethnic group, Zhang Yunjia, and Europe-based neo-classical pianist Cai Yun. Through 15 spring dishes and a piano album of the same name, the two artists — working across continents — compose what they describe as a multisensory "four-hand duet at a distance".
For Zhang, the kitchen is her instrument. For Cai, the piano is a landscape. Together, they translate rhythm into flavor and texture into melody, allowing diners to "hear" with their palate and "taste" with their ears.
A meeting of minds
The idea began, fittingly, with a walk. For Cai, now based in Malta, walking represents a way of thinking — unhurried, attentive, and open to resonance. That sensibility drew her, before they even met, to Zhang's restaurant.
"I first came across it online before returning to China," Cai recalls. "I was immediately struck by the space. My family works in architecture, so I'm very sensitive to how environments feel."
Their eventual meeting in Beijing was emotional. Zhang attended Cai's performance and found herself in tears. Soon after, she extended an invitation: come and taste the food before leaving China.
Cai accepted, and found unexpected parallels. "What stood out first was the refinement," she says."The textures, the plating, the way flavors are distributed: it's all incredibly delicate. At the same time, the dishes feel clean, almost restrained. There's also a sense of lightness. That combination mirrors how I approach music."
One particular dish lingered in her mind: dried radish shaved with the precision typically reserved for truffles. "In Europe, truffles are always associated with luxury," she says. "By treating something as humble as preserved radish in the same way, she was making a statement that Yunnan cuisine can carry the same dignity."
That moment revealed something deeper. "It showed her inner conviction. She knows exactly what she's doing, and she respects it."
Cai recognized a shared stance. As one of the few Chinese musicians in Malta working in neo-classical composition, she too navigates questions of identity and expression.
"She's completely at ease with her Yunnan roots," Cai says. "I feel the same way about my music and my cultural identity. That's where we connect."
Their collaboration unfolded remotely. Drawing on Zhang's menu concepts, ingredients and techniques, Cai composed five pieces — Elements, Below, Ground, Beyond, and Walker — each tracing the life cycle of plants, from water to earth to air. To Cai, plants embody a quiet, distinctly feminine force: layered, restrained, and often invisible at the surface.
