Raven Jiang’s Cosmic Threshold for The New Yorker

A silhouetted figure stands on a glowing amber disc and looks upward at a chain of translucent spheres rising into deep space.

Raven Jiang created this illustration for Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker review of “An Ark,” a mixed-reality performance in which audience members don VR headsets and are told, by holographic figures, that they have died and are being welcomed to the afterlife. Jiang’s illustration quietly makes the threshold between life and whatever comes next feel genuinely vast.

Translucent spheres stacked like a cosmological diagram illustrate the play’s premise: that consciousness continues. A solitary figure seen from behind, facing something sublime evokes Caspar David Friedrich’s monks before a sea of fog. A dramatic gradient sky shifting from warm to cool across the picture plane conjures a Sho Shibuya Manhattan sunrise.

Jiang keeps returning to figures confronting something enormous and intangible, which makes her a natural fit for stories about navigating the boundaries of human experience.