We constantly sense beauty and seek meaning.

Years ago, I was reading Victor Frankl's Men’s Searching for Meaning and one of the scenes stood out to me the most. A Jewish prisoner survivor recalled his days in a camp and said, "There was a window in my cell. From that window, I saw two trees. Sometimes birds came to rest there. Because of this window, I survived.”

What the Jews saw through the window was a precious aesthetic experience, albeit under difficult and extreme conditions.

I'm an Ikebana artist, meanwhile I am an aesthetics researcher at the Graduate School of Human Behavior in Social and Economic Change (GSBC) at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany. My current research project explores the aesthetics and symbolism in banking architectures in Germany and Austria.

To support or take part in my research work, please write to me yuli.liang@uni-jena.de