Anjing's Artworks

I do not paint the past.

I do not paint memory.

I paint what continues after memory begins to fade.

For many years, my research has focused on Chinese art history, aesthetics, memorial writings, and visual culture. Again and again, it brought me back to one question:

Why do certain relationships continue to exist long after the people, places, or civilizations that created them have disappeared?

Painting became my way of exploring this question.

I am not interested in reconstructing history.

I am interested in revealing how time quietly transforms it.

A ruined pagoda no longer functions as architecture, yet it still shapes the landscape.

A weathered stone stele can no longer be fully read, yet it continues to carry history.

A father's voice eventually disappears, yet something of its rhythm remains within the body.

These are not memories.

They are forms of continuity.

My paintings are therefore not representations of places.

They are explorations of how relationships survive after their original forms have dissolved.

Forests, mountains, ancient steps, broken walls, fragments of stone sculpture, thresholds, residual light, and slowly growing vegetation appear repeatedly throughout my work.

They are not symbols.

They are participants in time.

Material is inseparable from this way of thinking.

Working with pastel, watercolor, charcoal, matte acrylic, marble dust, repeated sanding, and gradual accumulation, I allow each surface to undergo its own temporal process.

Every painting is built through deposition, erosion, disappearance, and renewal.

The image is never completed all at once.

It slowly emerges, much like memory itself.

The white margins surrounding many of my paintings are equally important.

They are not borders.

They are spaces where images are still arriving—or quietly leaving.

In recent years, my work has gradually shifted beyond the idea of memory.

I have become increasingly interested in another question:

How does the world continue after disappearance?

Moss growing over stone.

Trees surrounding forgotten graves.

Light remaining after someone has gone.

Silence continuing to resonate within the body.

These moments suggest that disappearance is never absolute.

The world does not simply preserve what has been lost.

It transforms it into new forms of life.

Painting, for me, is not about remembering.

It is about witnessing how the visible world continues to grow through time.

Every artist spends a lifetime asking one question.

Mine is:

How does the world continue to carry those who have disappeared?

Everything I paint grows from this question.

My work is grounded in three interconnected ideas.

Time is not a line moving from past to future.

It is a material force that continuously reshapes the visible world.

Nothing exists alone.

A stone belongs to rain.

A tower belongs to the mountain.

A voice belongs to another body.

When one disappears, the relationship rarely disappears with it.

Disappearance is not an ending.

It is transformation.

The world does not preserve history.

It absorbs history and allows it to become something new.

My paintings are built around a recurring visual vocabulary.

Forests.

Mountains.

Stone.

Broken architecture.

Ancient steps.

Thresholds.

Residual light.

White margins.

Blurred boundaries.

Sedimentation.

Vertical landscapes.

Stone figures.

Growing moss.

Wind.

Silence.

These elements are not symbols.

They are structures through which time becomes visible.

I do not use materials to imitate reality.

I use them to imitate time.

Pastel allows images to breathe.

Watercolor permits memory to dissolve.

Marble dust introduces geological density.

Charcoal records hesitation.

Repeated sanding reveals hidden layers beneath the surface.

Every material carries its own rhythm of appearance and disappearance.

Residual Traces

Exploring what remains after experience has faded.

The Shape of Time

Painting the invisible forms through which time becomes perceptible.

Time and Mountains

Mountains as accumulations of vanished lives.

Time and Forest

Forests remembering without language.

Time and Earth

Land carrying civilizations that no longer speak.

Father's Voice

Investigating what remains after a familiar voice disappears.

He Anjing is an artist, art historian, and aesthetician.

He received his Ph.D. from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and completed postdoctoral research at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

He is currently a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University and an Associate Professor at the University of Science and Technology Beijing.

His artistic practice develops alongside long-term research in Chinese visual culture, aesthetics, memorial writings, and image theory.

Working between painting and scholarship, he investigates how time reshapes relationships, memory, and the visible world.

Rather than preserving the past, his paintings explore how disappearance becomes continuity, and how the world continually transforms loss into new forms of life.

2026

Painting What Continues

Harvard University CAMLab

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

2022

Fragmented Reflections

Yamingtai Art Gallery

Beijing, China

2019

Beyond the Light

541 Art Space

Sydney, Australia

2019

Solo Exhibition

China University of Mining and Technology

Beijing, China

2016

Traces of Ancient Civilizations

Museum of Egyptian Modern Art

Cairo, Egypt