I Wish Dying Could Be More Like This. 但愿死像这样。

Like a virgin trying to imagine sex. As a person who has never died, this is my fantasy of death. In the past year, I lost two family members. Watching them go reminded me of how ineffable this event is. The concept, the feeling, the final goodbye, and yet there is a strange sense that the person is still in the room, even after the machines stop beeping. You realize the body is not your loved one. Where did they go? And what did I love? The inaccessibility of their being as they slipped beyond reach, left me helpless. As a farewell gift and as a part of my deepest wish, I gathered the imagination to press upon this hermetically sealed, private event. I painted it as something that might—hopefully—be nice enough to endure. 1. After school In Chinese mythology, after death, you cross a river and ride a crane westward. I think of it as an airport. My grandpa used to wait for me at the school gate and take me home on his bike. I wish he could come pick me up, and that we would make the trip together. 2. Return My first memory as a person is my mother reading the poem Bring in the Wine by Li Bai — Do you not see the Yellow River’s waters pouring down from the heavens, rushing toward the sea, never to return; do you not see, before the bright mirror in the high hall, one grieving over white hair—at dawn like black silk, by dusk turned to snow? 将进酒 —— 君不见黄河之水天上来，奔流到海不复回；君不见高堂明镜悲白发，朝如青丝暮成雪。 I asked her what the poem meant, and she said we will all die one day. 3. Exit In The Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgensteindraws this diagram to show that we can never see what we see with—that the eye itself never appears in the field of vision. I feel the same way about life, so I painted my childhood photos into a 3D prism. Death, I wish, would let me see my own eye - to, at last, exit that form, to step beyond the limits of my own life. 4. It’s Mommy and I walking. This is one of the moments I would like to revisit before I leave. 5. Slip through Whenever I am very sick, I feel as if I could simply sink into my bed. I wish crossing over were that easy, just slipping through a sack or a membrane, the way Tolstoy describes it in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. My consciousness feels like a stone, or an egg—dense. It seems easier for something like that to slip through and drop cleanly out of this world. 6. Finale Lying there, comfortably, to watch the end of one’s world. And it would be quite pretty. Yifan Jiang (b. 1994, Tianjin, China) lives and works in New York, NY. Jiang is a Canadian artist currently based in New York City. Jiang received her Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University (2021) and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver. A project-based artist, Jiang uses elements of painting, animation, sculpture, and performance. Taking an irreverent approach to epistemology, she explores the grey intersection of the scientific, the psychological, and the magical. Jiang works by honing in on quotidian moments and combining them seemingly unrelated elements from multiple cultures and disciplines. Exhibitions in 2025 include a site specific installation at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, Second Body, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (group), Algorithms of Longing, Pace Gallery, Hong Kong (group) curated by Xin Wang, and AI, as Seen at the End of Ownership, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (group). Along with a number of exhibitions at Meliksetian | Briggs both solo and group, recent exhibitions include Space City: Art in the Age of Artemis at the Asia Society, Houston, curated by Owen Duffy (group), To your eternity - The 4th Future of Today Biennial, Today Art Museum, Beijing (group), a solo exhibition at Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, and Vacation, a two-person exhibition with James J.A. Mercer at the Roswell Museum, Roswell, NM among others. Jiang was a resident at the prestigious Core Residency Program at the The Museum of Fine Arts Houston in the years 2022 to 2024.