In China, the approach of Qingming Festival, or Tomb Sweeping Day, rarely announces itself loudly. It arrives quietly, like the change of a season, with rising temperatures amid the first signs of spring, and through the subtle awareness that it is time to remember the dearly departed.
Every year, millions of families in China head to cemeteries, carrying flowers, food and paper offerings. They sweep tombs, burn incense, and speak a few words, sometimes aloud, sometimes silently.
The rituals are familiar, almost habitual. And yet, beneath them lies a question that is becoming harder to ignore: what does it mean to die, and to remember, in contemporary China?
For young artist Zhou Yichen, it's also a time to revisit memory — not as abstraction, but as presence.
On a quiet morning in March 2024, Zhou's grandmother went to the kitchen to heat a bowl of white fungus soup. The house was empty. The rubber tip of her cane had come loose. She slipped and fell.
For Zhou, this started a period when his normal life came to a pause. Plans fell apart. Each day started to revolve around his grandmother, from meal preparations, medication and sleep, to the slow, careful movement from one room to another.
For months, from early spring into autumn, Zhou became her primary caregiver. He fed her, bathed her, wheeled her outside for air, and coaxed her into bed at night. The gestures were repetitive, almost indistinguishable from one day to the next. And yet, within that repetition, something else began to take shape.
Zhou, 32, who was born and raised in Wuhan, Hubei province, graduated from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts and later furthered his studies at the Pratt Institute in New York majoring in visual arts, had been making video games as art for years. He had made more than 100 such products, treating the medium less as entertainment than as a way of recording life, from fragments of thought and passing moods, to the moments that might otherwise dissolve unrecorded into the ether.
As he moved through those days with his grandmother, he began to develop another product.
The work that emerged, titled Grandma, does not dramatize illness or death. Instead, it lingers on the ordinary.
The final product materialized gradually, almost imperceptibly, as he moved through the routines of eldercare. Somewhere between helping her eat and taking her out for a walk, he began to imagine how these gestures might be translated into a video game.
Now, the video game is being displayed as a work of art in Beijing's Today Art Museum during an exhibition titled Well Worth the Journey: An Artistic Dialogue on Impermanence, Imperfection and Love, which runs until Monday and features artworks by over 30 artists, including paintings, photographs, installations and videos, all highlighting mankind's mortality.
By July 2024, the health condition of Zhou's grandmother had begun to decline more noticeably. Her movements slowed and her memory faltered. The future, once abstract, felt suddenly compressed. Zhou started working with urgency, building a rough version of the game in a matter of weeks.
The player inhabits his role, moving through a series of everyday interactions: sharing meals, sitting together, navigating in and out of familiar rooms.
There are no overt plot points, no escalating tension. Instead, the "game" accumulates meaning through the quiet, repetitive work of caring.
In September 2024, his grandmother passed away at home. She was 95.
When Grandma was released in early 2025, Zhou did not expect it to make any perceptible splash. He posted a few images online, fragments of dialogue and gameplay, without much explanation.
Strangers began writing to him, first in comments, then in longer messages, emails and private notes. They shared stories of their own: grandparents who had died, parents they had cared for, and losses that had not yet settled into memory.
"It's my personal experience, but it touches on something everyone has — love," he said.
The work resonated with many, perhaps because it arrived at a moment when conversations about death in China remain, in many contexts, muted, Zhou added.
Family photograph
Traditional practices — like funerals, ancestor rituals and prescribed forms of mourning — continue to structure how loss is observed. But emotional expression is often more constrained, shaped by an ethic of restraint, of not burdening others with one's grief.
A few years earlier and hundreds of miles away, Wang Naigong had found herself drawn into a different, but no less intimate, encounter with death.
The photographer's project, Jiu'er, began not as an artistic statement, but as an extension of something familiar: the family photograph. She had been asked to take pictures of a young mother, Jiu'er, with her three children. The woman was seriously ill.
At first, Wang approached it tentatively, but then her work picked up pace.
Over the next several years, she returned again and again, following the woman's life as it crawled toward its ultimate end. The work expanded into a long-term project. Using large-format cameras, Wang staged and restaged scenes from daily life, focusing not on eldercare details, but on something harder to capture on camera — atmosphere, emotion and the shifting relationships within a family.
"I'm a third person, a witness," she said.
The images are black and white, deliberately stripped of color. Wang wants to avoid what she calls the "consumption" of illness — the way suffering, when rendered too literally, can become something to be looked at, even pitied.
"I didn't want people to see her as merely a patient. I wanted them to see her spirit," she said.
What she saw, over time, was not only decline, but a kind of transformation. Despite the pain — sometimes intense enough to leave her sweating — the woman rarely expressed her discomfort outwardly. She continued her daily routines and even comported herself with dignity and composure to the best of her physical ability.
"She became more peaceful," Wang said. "Even more beautiful."
Although Jiu'er passed away in 2022 at the age of 36, her presence lives on in family memories, which consist of more than 700 photos taken over three years.
The resulting series of photos, titled I Am Still With You, won the photographer the Long-Term Projects, Asia category, at the 67th World Press Photo Contest. Now, the photos are also being displayed during the exhibition in Beijing.
If Zhou's work grew more popular due to active participation in eldercare, Wang's emerged from compassionate observation. But both circle around a similar phenomenon — the difficulty of speaking about death.
"In China, people still avoid it," Wang said.
In her experience, families often withhold information from the person who is ill, hoping to protect them. Conversations are delayed. Truths are softened. The result, she said, can leave behind a different kind of pain — one marked by things unsaid.
Last year, Wang's own father died. By then, her years working on the project Jiu'er had already begun to reshape how she approached loss. She stayed with him, accompanied him, and helped him do the things he wanted to do before his life's final chapter.
"I still cry," she said. "But I don't feel regret."
Sociological perspective
For Jing Jun, a sociology professor at Tsinghua University, the questions about death began with a number.
Each year, around 10 million people die in China. That means at least 10 million families experience loss annually.
Since 2019, Jing and his research team — spanning more than a dozen universities — have been collecting their stories, assembling nearly 1,000 surveys and over 300 interviews to understand how death is actually experienced, rather than how it is imagined.
"What we have are narratives about how people describe the process, how they remember it," Jing said.
In the summer of 2025, Bringing Death Back into Life, an exhibition held in Beijing, spent two months stirring public discussion on the topic of mortality through artistic means.
The exhibition saw Jing provide academic backing, and he gave speeches during the event.
"One of the most immediate realities our research reveals is not ritual, but pressure," said Jing, whose new book, Chinese Narrative Death and Dying, will be released soon.
He mentioned that in more than 90 percent of families with cancer patients, the final months of life bring catastrophic medical expenses — costs that can exceed 40 percent of a household's income. The financial and emotional burdens remain very daunting.
Death, in today's China, is often entangled with the healthcare system — hospitals, treatments and decisions about how far to go in trying to turn the condition around.
Evolving ideas and practices regarding elderly healthcare have changed not only where people die — more often in hospitals, especially in large cities — but also how death is understood. It has become something to manage, to postpone, sometimes to resist or even ignore at all costs.
Despite the pressures of modern life, Jing found something that surprised him.
"In our research, we almost never saw people dying completely alone," he said.
Unlike in some societies where solitary deaths have become a social concern, China still maintains dense networks of care.
Even seniors living in rural areas, despite having children working in far-off cities, are rarely left entirely unattended.
Family, even as it changes, continues to anchor the experience of death.
If traditional Chinese values, shaped in part by Confucianism, emphasize filial piety — the duty of the young to care for the old — Jing's research suggests that, at the end of life, the direction of care often shifts.
He calls it "reverse care".
In many of the interviews, dying individuals were described as worrying less about themselves than about those around them. They comforted their children, reassured their families, and sometimes even made decisions to limit treatment in order to reduce financial or emotional burdens.
"One mother told her daughter she was happy that she had lived well. She was the one doing the comforting," Jing said.
This impulse — to care for others even at the moment of departure — resonates with older ideas, including those influenced by Buddhism, in which death is understood as a passage, and one's final state of mind carries meaning.
But it is also deeply practical, grounded in the realities of contemporary life.
For all its rituals, death in China often remains difficult to talk about directly. Families may avoid discussing diagnoses. Jing has seen how this can lead to regret — things left undone, words left unsaid.
Palliative care
In recent years, he has also noticed a shift. Younger generations, he said, are increasingly willing to engage with death more directly — through lectures, exhibitions and even conversations about end-of-life planning strategies.
Still, these discussions remain limited. Practices like advance care planning or living wills are not yet widespread. Many people, he observes, only begin to think about such matters when confronted with serious illness or old age.
"What we lack," he said, "is not only systems, but a broader understanding of what a 'good death' means."
Is it freedom from pain? The absence of financial burdens? The presence of family? A sense of closure? The answers vary.
"I've seen too many endings in which people pretend death is something distant," said Lu Guijun, chief physician and director of the department of palliative care and pain management at Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital.
At the hospital, death is not an abstract idea. It is a daily reality — measured in breath, in pain and in conversations that cannot be postponed.
Since 2019, his team has cared for around 1,000 patients, most of them in the final stages of cancer or chronic illness. The goal is not to prolong life at any cost, but to make the final stage as calm, dignified and meaningful as possible.
"This is the most important part of medicine because everyone will come here eventually," he said.
In China, that moment carries enormous weight.
"As the population ages, palliative care is no longer a marginal issue. It is becoming a central social concern," he said.
Yet, the system is still catching up.
One of the biggest barriers is silence, he said, adding: "People don't talk about death. Families often hide the diagnosis from the patient."
In doing so, they hope to protect loved ones from fear. But the result is often the opposite — patients lose the chance to make their own decisions, to say proper goodbyes, and to prepare for the great unknown.
This silence extends beyond hospitals. In daily life, death is rarely discussed openly. In media and education, it is often portrayed as something frightening or distant. As a result, many people grow up without ever learning how to face it when it inevitably arrives.
Even so, the need is real.
For doctors like Lu, working in this field changes not only patients' final days, but also their own understanding of life.
"I used to think medicine was about curing. Now, I think it's also about how to help people leave well," Lu said.
He described a simple framework for a "good death". A person should be prepared for the end, maintain dignity, and have their physical and emotional needs respected.
"It's not about giving up. It's about choosing what matters," the doctor said.
In the end, what stays with Lu are not the medical details, but the human moments.
"Fear of death is natural," said Liu Yin, director of the palliative care department at Beijing Royal Integrative Medicine Hospital.
"But what people are really afraid of is pain, loss and unfinished business. Most Chinese people don't consider these issues, because when life is going well, no one thinks about death. Few ever reflect that we are born moving toward death, and that one day, death is inevitable," Liu said.
Her work, she believes, is not to remove that fear — but to make space for it, and to help people meet it with less suffering, and more clarity. Because, as she puts it: "Death is not the opposite of life. It is part of it."