*There is no level at which the world is actually fixed, but there are many at which the illusion exists that it is.

Gradients are one of the most overused visual tools of the last decade. They arrived in flat design as a kind of forbidden fruit, too decorative, too emotional, too analogue for the clean minimalism that dominated the early 2010s. And then returned with force, flooding brand identities, app interfaces, and social media graphics with soft chromatic transitions that signalled warmth, depth, and a vague sense of the organic. By the 2020s, the gradient had become shorthand for a certain kind of overdone contemporary aesthetic: polished, approachable, faintly futuristic. It was everywhere, and it meant almost nothing. An attempt at warmth now so far gone it's cold.

But their proliferation was in part due to their problem-solving capabilities. A gradient, is after all, a logical way to solve this: how to represent something that does not want to be fixed. Time. Mood. Myself.

I don't know if I can pinpoint when I stopped wanting to be a fashion designer and how I became the unfortunately amorphous title of "creative," because for so long, I refused to be impractical. Refused to make art, just wanted to make a good living. Had to do creative work because I had no other skills, no proper education. But when I zoom out just a little, I remember that five years ago, I couldn't think of a favourite book because all I'd read for years were books on how to be more productive. I remember when I first started taking writing seriously and looked back at my earlier writing thinking, I can't believe I thought this was good. I remember wanting desperately to get into tech because it was the new gold rush and equalizer, and then leaving a few years later because I'd had enough of endless, infinite growth.

Things have changed, and they're easiest to recognize against the tangible lines I, or society, have identified. Jobs, metrics, milestones. Desperate moments and pivot points. Other than that, it's hard to pinpoint anything, to know the direction toward which I am oriented. Whether I have just entered with my fingertips barely past the threshold or if I'm already miles past it. I don't know the truth of where I stand in the grand scheme of things. It's all a series of overlapping loops, colours bleeding, identities merging and diverging, then perhaps meeting again.

What I know for certain is that change happened, even when I couldn't feel it happening. I was so resolute about it; not just the vague feeling of stasis. A strong, screeching silence emphasized by the speed of cars passing on the road in front of my window, by the number of pregnancies that have been announced, then the birthdays, and then the lightspeed evolution of potato-babies into people.

And there I was, doing this. I picked up coloured pencils for the first time and a year later was on my hands and knees in paint-splattered clothes. I wrote poems for years that almost no one read, stopped for months, came back. There was no morning I woke up different. I couldn't feel myself changing from inside the change. You can only recognize it after, from a distance, against some fixed point you happened to mark. The in-between is where it actually happened. What makes a gradient a gradient is everything in the middle: the part that is neither one thing nor the other. Everything happens here.

So, gradients: not as a style or an aesthetic, but as the most honest structural description I could find for how anything actually changes.

In the book, The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, author and neuroscientist Bobby Azarian references the phrase, "Nature abhors a gradient", a play on "Nature abhors a vacuum" by Aristotle. He uses it to explain that whenever two different states of matter interact, stasis is impossible. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that any difference, whether in temperature, pressure, chemical concentration, or electrical charge, will automatically begin to decrease. Nature is always trying to close the gap.

This tendency isn’t just a law of physics. It’s a pattern that plays out in nature, people, and even design trends.

Gradients might be more popular than ever because a) technology makes it easier to produce them and b) we are, consciously or subconsciously, intuiting something about the world around us and ourselves, expressing both our desire—and the natural order of things—toward change. 

I had been using gradients in my work for years before I understood what I was actually investigating. They always felt like a convenient yet resonant part of my toolkit. Easy to make, figuratively rich. It wasn't until I committed to the 100-day project in March 2025 that it became clear. A poem a day, each one structured around a two-colour transition. The gradient was the form. Time was the content. What surprised me was how often I wanted to stop because I could not see or feel progress, even as the accumulation was real and happening. The project produced the same disorientation I have experienced in every other area of my life: change too slow to perceive while inside it, visible only in retrospect.

From there the work expanded. Four micro-essays. A painted canvas of one hundred distinct gradients. Motion studies. Digital prints. Each medium asking the same question and answering it differently, or as I later decided was more accurate: each medium asking a different question and answering it the same way.

Here, just look at the world: it'll tell you about everything.

—Concept statement for "Gradient World", written and published May 2026 by Ana Wang