Jiangyuan Ai

My work has always been an exploration of the environment and society I inhabit—an attempt to confront the structures that shape existence, to question the meaning of life itself. For a long time, I found myself caught in a cycle between freedom and restriction. There is no freedom without restriction, no restriction without freedom. True liberation does not come from the absence of restriction but from the dissolution of desire itself.

In surrendering the self’s attachment to meaning, I began to sense something beyond the cycle—a state I can only describe as pure existence. But the closer I came to the answer, the more fear consumed me, the fear of knowing that life very likely has no inherent meaning. During my years of art studies, I have come to believe that modern art is an act of excavating meaning from the ruins of meaninglessness. We assign significance to things not because they possess it but because we cannot bear to exist without it. Therefore, the new age of art will build on the confrontation of the absence of meaning.

Nothing needs to be proven.
Nothing needs to be defined.

We move through constant transformation,
shedding the illusion of fixed form,
allowing ourselves to emerge, dissolve,
and emerge again.

Existence has never been an answer.
It is the moment of falling,
the echo of the wind,
the ashes after the fire,
the flow of the water,
an unfinished beginning.