Jianying Dou is a multimedia artist. She works between illustration, design, painting, animation, virtual installations and found objects. Her work is often based on her own experiences after using diaristic strategies to chronicle her thoughts on the eternity of nature and the shortness of life.
Jianying Dou
Pre-obituary
In Memory Of Jianying Dou, age 25. She had aspirations of making it to 100. She was born November 17, 1995, in Yunnan, China. She graduated from Central Saint Martins (BA Graphic Design) in 2018. Later she studied Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, graduating in the Summer of 2021.
She grew up living in a place with a vast sky and charming clouds. She was born with a fascination for these views. It is in some way a representation of the infinite, linking this planet to celestial bodies afar. The sky without boundaries always brought her a sense of awe in nature.
Since 2016, she took a picture of the sky every day. It was her daily routine to look up and observe. 2020 was a very special year because of the pandemic, she rarely went out. The news every day made her feel particularly lonely and powerless during a period of isolation. She thought that people are like clouds. The life of clouds is short within the constant sky, people are very fragile, like clouds they come and go.
She was free like a cloud until the pandemic trapped her in a tomb. Her suffering from Covid-isolation is over and she is "Free at Last" at Cloud Cemetery.
![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/f_webp,h_720,w_1280,c_fill,g_auto,q_auto/v1/rca2021/60c39db0a98c7847e5017202-761846?_a=AXAH4S10)
![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/f_webp,h_1080,w_1920,c_fill,g_auto,q_auto/v1/rca2021/60c39db0a98c7847e5017202-834231?_a=AXAH4S10)
![[untitled]](https://res.cloudinary.com/rca2020/image/upload/f_webp,h_1080,w_1920,c_fill,g_auto,q_auto/v1/rca2021/60c39db0a98c7847e5017202-913186?_a=AXAH4S10)
I have always had a strong sense of my own mortality. As my relatives passed away, I became more aware that human life is limited. Walking in the cemetery reminds me to live, I spend a lot of time looking at the epitaphs and wondering about the people who are buried there, thinking about their hopes and dreams, their love, their hate, searching for answers that no one will ever able to give. I wonder if over a century ago, mourners had stood and wept for their loved ones.
However, they have passed away, erased by time, like clouds dissipating in the eternal sky.
The cemetery stores finite life and becomes an infinite sky that humans can touch. We are all clouds that once existed in this sky.
The day before yesterday was the same as yesterday, yesterday was the same as today, every day was the same.
I want to leave here, I want to scream, but no one can hear me.
The window was filled with the opposite building, filling the glass, I saw the reflection of the swaying branches and the broken sky.
I became a cloud, a flying, free cloud.
I like to walk in the wind, I'm shouting, I'm laughing, all the people in the windows that I pass by can hear it.
The dark clouds swallowed me, I am a cloud, a dead cloud, and the wind and the dark cloud partnered to murder me.