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.