Yifan Jiang is a Chinese Canadian artist based in New York whose project-driven practice encompasses painting, sculpture, animation, and performance. As a diasporic artist, Jiang’s work examines shared similarities and differences across cultures and belief systems. Her work invokes magical realism—a literary and artistic genre that blends reality with fantasy—to create everyday scenes interlaced with references to philosophy, history, and science. Jiang’s uncanny subject matter points to the limits of language in expressing fragments of our imagination. 

Cafeteria was inspired by Jiang’s frequent visits to the Brochstein Pavilion while she audited philosophy classes at Rice University during her two-year Core Residency Program at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. To create this work, Jiang drew from Houston’s culinary histories, illustrating pastries—including those sold in the café here—through an expressive, freehand approach. Overlaid with acrylic paint, the mural depicts the silhouettes of windswept oak trees, birds in flight, and passing students, their shadows mirroring the world outside. In this space where contemplation and leisure intersect, Jiang’s Cafeteria raises questions about what we know, what reality is, and where it begins to slip into a dream. 

“I wanted to show how easy it is to drift into a daydream. Sleep-deprived. Before your coffee. After a heavy lunch. Staring off, zoning out. And then you see something in a place you’ve seen hundred times before; a sun-bleached wallpaper of bread on a cafe wall. But this time, something’s off.” 

—Yifan Jiang

Off the Wall: Yifan Jiang, Cafeteria is organized by Noor Alé, Associate Curator, Moody Center for the Arts. It is made possible by Leslie and Brad Bucher and by Susan Brochstein in memory of Raymond Brochstein.

Off the Wall at the Brochstein Pavilion is a partnership between the Moody Center for the Arts and the Core Residency Program at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The series commissions Core Residency Program alumni to create site-specific installations for this space, which will be on view for one year.