Artist | YIFAN JIANG

Date | JUL 4 to AUG 24, 2025

Room 815, 33 Sichuan Middle Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai

This exhibition draws its name from Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It - where Rosalind disguises herself as a man and flees into the Forest of Arden. There, she meets Orlando, and they fall in love. The play is full of misunderstandings, but eventually ends with weddings and reunions. But the play's title whispers deeper truth. Like her, we grasp for lines never written. As You Like It captures life’s dual nature: cheerful yet absurd, overflowing yet empty. This paradox births a unique blend of joy and helplessness in our daily existence.

When I was a kid, my cousin told me about something he read in the paper: that an asteroid would hit Earth in fifteen years. I did the math—I’d only be twenty. Life would’ve just started. That image stuck with me: a rock, moving fast enough, could erase everything. Our lives, our systems, the whole thing we call civilization… only a few thousand years old. Barely a blink.

It’s like we’ve been thrown into a play we never agreed to, no script, no directions, with the lights on, cameras rolling, the world already spinning. Rush out at the subway station, the solar system rolls in like marbles across the smooth floor. Summer in Wangjing, the heat can turn an airplane into paper, light enough to surf on. The desert sun sinks low—low enough to trip you and throw you into a pond. Every breeze brushes something. Every ray of light heats up something else. Life hums forward, moment by moment, endlessly flowing. Like a baby deer, fast asleep at the bottom of a stream, white time washes by unnoticed. Vacation is an absurd fable on the nature of nature. Following a protagonist road-tripping home from college, a sudden volcanic eruption totals his car and destroys all his possessions. Barely surviving, our destitute star builds a life for himself out of furniture that has washed up on the shore, making an unremarkable patch of beach his home. The story unfolds as he meets three animal companions: an intransigent seagull, a brilliant spider hidden in a broken laptop, and a divorced fish battling for custody of her 50,000 children.

As You Like It is about those fleeting moments—the ones we almost miss. The ones that feel made up but are felt for real. The curtains in the space are a symbol. They repeat, over and over, like a warning or a joke. Everything outside the window is a performance. But what lingers when the curtain falls?

About the Artists

Jiang Yifan（b.1994，Tianjing，China) is a Chinese-Canadian artist working in painting, animation, and installation. Jiang received her MFA from Columbia University, New York, and her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada. A project-based artist, Jiang uses elements of painting, animation, sculpture, and performance.Jiang Yifan's works usually start with a concept and an idea.Use a witty perspective to explore the intersection between science, sensibility and philosophy. Jiang works by honing in on quotidian moments and combining them seemly unrelated elements from multiple cultures and disciplines.