Daoist tradition teaches that at the time of death, souls journey to their next dimension by taking flight on cranes. Regarded as symbols of immortality in ancient Chinese lore, these mythic cranes were companions of Shou Lao, god of longevity, assisting the deity in shepherding earth-bound souls to his eternal realm. In Chinese Canadian artist Yifan Jiang’s painting After School (2025), positioned near the entrance to 56 Henry, two lithe cranes are seen strolling across a vast landscape. On the other side of a far-reaching gate stands a phantasmic figure representing the artist’s late grandfather, signaling his absence from the physical plane. So begins I wish dying could be more like this, Jiang’s first New York solo exhibition, in which the artist contends with two familial deaths and human mortality by exploring the cultural lore of her upbringing.
Our historical present entails constant confrontation with the omnipresence of death and disappearance. I entered Jiang’s exhibition wading my own sea of staggering loss—friends revealed to be foes, aspirations tied to a quickly dissipating future, a nation crushed by the weight of its own deceit—so I recognized the pervasive grief that Jiang invokes from the show’s outset, on the gallery’s floor. There, laid out on the concrete, we encounter a circle of human silhouettes, progressing from tumbling infancy, through curious childhood, sobering adulthood, and finally, old age and infirmity. Painted with black tempera and then submerged in polychromatic glitter, the forms are at once somber and magical, a fusion of mourning and elation that continues in the works above.
Yifan Jiang, After School, 2025, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist, 56 HENRY, New York; and Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas.
Emerging from this cycle of life are six paintings depicting Jiang’s utopic visions of dying. “Like a virgin trying to imagine sex,” the artist assumes the task of imagining her own demise as a liberating experience, and in doing so, wishes her loved ones a safe passage. Jiang, who taught herself animation, begins each piece with the 3D graphics software Blender, using the technology to construct gridded scenes that mimic fluid dynamics, overlaying the digital scans with vibrant oil paints to cinematic effect. Building upon this narrative quality, each painting is then accompanied by prose by the artist, typed up in a single pamphlet available at the gallery’s entrance, detailing the theories, folk histories, and personal imaginings from which they are derived.
We see one fantasy take shape on the golden shoreline of Return (2025), where sparkling tributaries permeate a rocky coast, rushing toward the expansive ocean. A woman merges with the surging stream, the waters carrying her to a glowing amber abyss. In the writing accompanying the work, Jiang recalls her first memory, her mother reading Chinese poet Li Bai’s Bring in the Wine, which speaks of “one grieving over white hair,” with “waters pouring down from the heavens, rushing toward the sea, never to return.” When asked what the poem meant, Jiang’s mother replied “we will all die one day.” Here, Jiang relies on formative cultural mythologies and collective imagination to lend aesthetic shape and legibility to the otherwise inconceivable process of dying.
Yifan Jiang, Slip through, 2025, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist, 56 HENRY, New York; and Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas.
Other paintings find Jiang transcending grief to traverse ecstatically optimistic visions, as in Slip Through (2025). Inspired by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which follows its protagonist’s journey to accepting his imminent death from a terminal illness, the top of this canvas envisions Jiang’s consciousness as a neon green egg surrounded by dreamlike terrestrial forms—a translucent tidal wave, a luminous aurora. Moving down the canvas, the egg is seen slowly shrinking and dissipating into formlessness, as its surroundings follow suit; a limp, disembodied human hand and a blurred foot dissolve into the surrealist teal and crimson backdrop as the watery tides are rendered increasingly abstract, traveling through a matrix of indigo stars until, at the bottom of the canvas, all forms converge in a realm of vivid cerulean light. Standing before the massive piece, I’m struck by a visceral pleasure that might seem incongruent with the somber subject matter, imagining my own consciousness sinking into this eclectic, loving force. Antithetical to the Western imagination, which reduces dying to a dreadful taboo, Slip Through invites viewers to imagine the release of human embodiment as divine catharsis.
Jiang’s euphoric reverie continues with Exit (2025), which takes its inspiration from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which the philosopher diagrams the human eye, pondering the conundrum of its inability to see itself. Introducing the work, Jiang writes, “I feel the same way about life, so I painted my childhood photos into a 3D prism.” The resultant sprawling seven-foot-wide painting progresses from a colorful hodgepodge of Jiang’s childhood memories on the left to a floating oculus absorbing them on the right. Beginning as nonlinear splashes—a toddler reading in a caretaker’s lap, friends in a caring embrace, a child peeking playfully from behind a corner—Jiang’s remembrances become progressively impressionistic as they march toward their ultimate resting place. “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,” Jiang writes. There’s something profoundly resonant in Jiang’s non-representational memories, an equilibrium of sorrow and beauty as her recollections fade from legibility into a world that cannot yet be known, reflecting the vulnerability and impermanence inherent to the human condition.
Yifan Jiang, Exit, 2025, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist, 56 HENRY, New York; and Meliksetian | Briggs, Dallas.
Near the gallery’s exit is Finale (2025), the exhibition’s culminating moment of stillness. Here, all discernible beings have achieved complete dissolution, diffused into a periwinkle nirvana. Meteor showers, a spectral mountain range, and sedating blends of magenta chimeras dazzle, as orbs of white light invoke the cosmos. Absent of conscious, representational forms, this otherworld itself is rendered animate, alchemizing the lives that have been disassembled to arrive here. Like the life cycle illustrated on the gallery’s floor, Finale depicts the completion of a long journey, where the aftermath of fated transformation is pure serenity.
Leaving the gallery, I think of bell hooks’s admission, “I came to theory because I was hurting,” how inherited cultural frameworks can offer roadmaps for processing the unthinkable. Reaching backward, to grasp at the ancient wisdom and oral histories that endow her life with meaning, Jiang too provides templates for surviving the ache of finality—the shattered fantasy, the loss of identity, of possibility, of your very best friend. At these endings, Jiang offers visions of how we might face our own inevitable transitions, surrendering to the world made anew.
