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.