现场图，“让她降落”，阿那亚艺术中心，摄影：孙诗
Installation views, As She Descends, Aranya Art Center. Photography Sun Shi
BANK is pleased to announce that Sun Yitian's newly commissioned work is featured in the group exhibition As She Descends at the Aranya Art Center. Curated by guest curator Yuan Fuca and Damien Zhang, Director of the Aranya Art Center, the exhibition brings together 18 Chinese and international artists to respond to the legend of Lady Meng Jiang, in an attempt to release Lady Meng Jiang from classicalist readings and engage more open-ended, diverse aspects of her figure.
Sun Yitian’s She Waits, But She No Longer Weeps (2025) enters into a trans‑temporal dialogue between the Chinese legend of Lady Meng Jiang and Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting Christina’s World (1948). By re‑examining the distant‑gazing suffering women in both works, the artist challenges the sentimental aesthetics often attached to traditional gender narratives.
Lady Meng Jiang appears here in a half‑crawling posture, yet her powerful physique and upright spine defy the stereotype of the fragile woman. She no longer gazes into the distance, but turns to look back at the viewer, which is a shift that dissolves the tragic tropes of “distance” and “the unreachable.” The boulder that transforms from her body lies across the foreground, not as a symbol of eternity, but as a barrier that blocks the “beyond.”
In the foreground, an exposure lamp hints that this might be a model posing in a scene of suffering, raising questions about the romanticization of female pain. Stars and sea shimmer distantly with a sense of hope, creating tension with the theatrical setup in the front. The work asks: Are we looking at a mythical woman of chastity and martyrdom, or yet another consumption of female suffering in contemporary culture? Through reconfiguring the relationship between body, space, and gaze, the piece transforms “suffering as spectacle” into “self‑defined presence,” charging a traditional symbol with the force of contemporary female agency.
Long rooted in folklore ,the legend has also served as a marker for mass culture. The exhibition title itself is drawn from a classic pop song from the turn of the century. Modern and contemporary novelists such as Zhang Henshui and Su Tong have written versions of the legend, while Gu Jiegang’s research of Lady Meng Jiang pioneered the field of Chinese folklore studies. These creative and scholarly attempts demonstrate that re-storying is not to indulge nostalgia; but to reposition and renew. Taking “restorying” as its methodology, this exhibition invites viewers to consider how “She” might encounter the contemporary after descending from symbolism.
