Yifan Jiang: Final Descent
Jun 1 – Jul 6, 2025
Yifan Jiang: Final Descent
Artist：Yifan Jiang
Exhibition: Final Descent
Duration: Jun 1 – Jul 6, 2025
Opening: 4:00 PM，Sunday, Jun 1, 2025
Hunsand Space (Hangzhou) is pleased to present Final Descent, a solo exhibition by Yifan Jiang, opening on June 1. As a Chinese-Canadian artist, Jiang often finds herself in a kind of suspension—shaped by shifting geographies and a layered sense of identity. This feeling leaves the body and senses in a constant state of free fall. The works in this exhibition emerge from that sense of suspension, centered on Jiang’s latest paintings. In them, time and space drift and tangle in surreal ways—everything caught in a state of unresolved tension.
“We are about to start our final descent,” is the phrase that an airplane stewardess uses to herd people back into their seats before landing. You hear it on any plane heading anywhere, initiating a fall that could end in death or vacation.
Sitting in a flying tin can is strange. With its lids sealed, it blasts between a blur of institutional lobbies, polished floors that smell like silverware, and exotic animals blinking slowly in the wrong climate.
Sometimes it feels like your soul splits in two—one part still descending a mountain, while the other is already seated at a ballet in Lincoln Center. Time zones shuffle like cards, reality shaved into slices. Moments get caught in the wings of airplanes, crumpled and folded into memory at awkward angles.
Growing up as an immigrant, this was not a state but a permanent condition. Identity shifts with each setting. Personality stretches and reshapes. The only consistency is change. Life becomes a long free fall of languages, toys, food crumbs, temperatures, glances. They flicker like confetti, clashing, fusing, and combusting in midair. There’s no floor here. Even the ground of the everyday—the mundane—caves, as you keep falling, from room to room to zoo to lake to sky.
One Sunday morning is a fable-esque thought experiment exploring the limits of language and human empathy. The story begins with humanity’s sudden loss of language on one unsuspecting Sunday morning. Set in a parallel universe that is a magical realist rendering of our contemporary reality, two protagonists originating from opposite sides of the world push these questions to the breaking point. What did we humans gain from language, and at what cost?
ABOUT ARTIST
Yifan Jiang (b. 1994, Tianjin, China) 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.
Exhibitions in 2025 include 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 (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. Art on the Grid at New York Public Art Fund, New York, NY. Her work is in the collections of Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Her animated works were selected by the London International Animation Festival, Animafest, Croatia, and Rotterdam International Film Festival, among others.Jiang was a resident at the Core Residency Program at the The Museum of Fine Arts Houston in the years 2022 to 2024 and adjunct Faculty at Columbia University, New York.
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