Paper Offering in Asia: Qingming Special

What does it mean to craft a gift for the afterlife—one that is meant to disappear?

In many Asian cultures, paper offerings—folded into gleaming ingots or crafted into intricate replicas of houses, cars, and even smartphones—are far from ephemeral. Burned during observances such as the Qingming Festival, they are acts of love and remembrance: tangible prayers that bridge the boundary between the living and the dead. Through fire, these delicate creations are believed to transform into usable goods for ancestors, ensuring they lack for nothing and remain connected to the families who honor them.

This Qingming Festival, the Heritage Museum of Asian Art and Tiandi Universal Market invite you to explore this profound tradition across Asia and its diasporas, alongside its contemporary reinterpretations. Join us to reflect on the artistry and meaning behind one of Asia’s most enduring spiritual practices—and to create your own paper offering.

About the Artist Collective:

Tiandi Universal Market 天地通用市场 is an artist collective co-led by Siyang Dai and Yejia Sun for a re-imagination of the death culture of Asia and Asian Diaspora. As a recipient of A4(Asian American Arts Alliance) 2026 “What Can We Do?” Funding, Tiandi Universal Market is collaborating with museums, art spaces, and community centers to host events on paper-crafting offerings and art therapy storytelling sessions across Chicago and New York City. The team includes Siyang Dai, Yejia Sun, Nany Chen, Avery Liu, Hao Jie Sim, and Rui Lin.

• Yejia Sun 孙也佳 (host/Co-Lead) is an artist and scholar from Beijing, China, and based in New York and Chicago. As a PhD student in performance studies at Northwestern University, she is specifically interested in the digital death culture in East Asia, such as digital mourning rituals, women ghosts in computer games, and human corpses in exhibitions. Drawing from her artistic practices as a dramaturg in theater and socially engaged art, she combines her interests in academic inquiry with the public humanities projects to make impacts for a larger audience. She is a recipient of the Davis Project for Peace fellowship, A4 WCWD funding, the Lisa Lu Scholarship, LMCC grant (Tongues Collective), and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative summer grant. (www.yejiasun.com)

• Siyang Dai (Co-Lead) 戴思飏 is an anthropologist whose work explores the intersections of material culture, vernacular practice, and public storytelling. Trained in Cultural and Museum Anthropology, her research uses applied ethnography to examine how everyday objects exercise agency within networks of people and things. She is interested in developing collaborative narratives rooted in local knowledge and daily experience