After returning from Germany in the early 1990s, Zhou Chunya began to create works with traditional Chinese culture connotation. "Vase of Flowers" created in 1993 by Zhou Chunya was one of the series of rock and vase paintings he had turned to. During this period, Zhou Chunya applied what he had learned in Chinese landscape paintings and flower-and- bird sketches into the creation of his works. The artists exaggerated the traditional shape of vase and flower, and gave full play of the material to the painting to enrich the details and texture, instead of traditional ink in soft texture, as well as to use complicated structure to replace the flat visual feature of literati painting. In this series of works, Zhou Chunya has been seeking a more intimate and spontaneous relationship with the nature, so as to capture the essence of most essential forms and expressions. "Vase of Flowers" depicted by Zhou Chunya is proicient in painting technique, gaining strength from surrounding space, just as famous artist, Badashanren (i.e. Zhu Da), who painted a fish, a rock, a bird - with exact number of strokes, no more or less. Shuangxi Yin, a well-known critic, appraised Zhou Chunya with the comments, "His paintings have peculiarly combined classical landscape imagery in Song and Yuan dynasties with frame structure in western paintings, which produced an overriding atmosphere spanning human geography and historical culture, and making people seemed like to enter the universe of prehistoric heaven and the realm of fantasy."