Before making Best Partners, my idea of radio art was pretty simple. I thought it was just about having people talk, adding some music, layering in environmental sounds, and making the story clear. Sound was a tool. Dialogue was the lead.

Then I did some research. I listened to Gregory Whitehead’s On the Shore Dimly Seen and Wyllis Cooper’s Quiet, Please, and I realised how narrow my thinking had been.

Those two works showed me that the most distinctive thing about radio art, what sets it apart from other narrative forms, is its relationship with the listener. Film bundles image and sound together and delivers them straight to you. You sit there and receive it. But radio art can’t do that. It only gives you sound. The images have to be built by the listener themselves. What kind of light the desk lamp casts, how big the room is, whether the person’s face is sad or frozen in shock—all of that is drawn stroke by stroke inside the listener’s mind. It’s actually a very deep kind of collaboration, one that demands more participation from the listener than any other medium. And Cooper taught me something else: silence in a sound work is not the same as emptiness. He could give you an entire scene with nothing in it—just breathing and pauses—but that silence has a weight to it. It pushes you forward, makes you lean in, makes you think. It’s not laziness, not a failure to fill the space. It’s a kind of courage. It’s choosing to swallow back an emotion that’s already risen to the throat, and handing that space, untouched, to the listener.

I carried both of these things into the making of Best Partners.

When I wrote the script, I started consciously thinking about which moments should be told through sound, and which moments should simply say nothing. The sound of Da Lin flipping through folders, the chaotic clatter of Xiao Liang’s backpack zipper—these weren’t designed to fill the background. Their purpose was to use sound directly to lay the two characters’ personalities in front of the listener. You close your eyes, you hear the crisp efficiency of paper being handled and the messy rattle of a bag being rummaged through, and you know exactly what kind of people these two are—no dialogue needed. And the pause after the grandmother reveals the truth—we agreed on two seconds, no more, no less—that came straight from what I learned from Cooper. At that moment, where language couldn’t reach, sound didn’t have to rush in. Silence itself could be the moment where emotion is fullest.

Looking back on the whole process, my biggest takeaway is this: radio art is not storytelling with your eyes blindfolded. The very thing that makes it special is that it gives you only sound. And that limitation is not a shortcoming—it’s a unique kind of freedom. When the creator doesn’t fill in every line, that’s when the listener has room to step inside. The best radio art is not a monologue from the creator. It’s a single breath, completed together by the creator and the listener.