BJ Miller
光明 “Brightness”
BJ Miller is an American physician, author and speaker who practices hospice and palliative medicine. He is best known for his 2015 TED talk, What Really Matters at the End of Life, which has been watched millions of times, and he now sees patients and caregivers through the online palliative care service Mettle Health.
A life-altering accident during his second year at Princeton cost him both legs and one arm, and turned his career towards the relief of suffering. He co-wrote A Beginner's Guide to the End with Shoshana Berger — a practical book about dying, written for the living.
Fei interviewed BJ for Feisworld. Xiang has never met him. She painted him from his talks, his photographs, and her daughter's account of the conversation — which is how every portrait in this room was made.
Go and find them
This page is about the painting. Their own work is better.
Their books
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with Shoshana Berger
What is in this painting
Xiang Li builds a portrait out of creatures. Each one is a claim about the person sitting among them.
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1 The title
Two characters in a bordered box, top left, above her signature: brightness. On a portrait of a man who works with the dying.
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2 The phoenix
Good fortune and health — a future, promised over his head.
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3 Peacock plumes
The tail sweeps the whole top of the silk in green and gold, the way a canopy would over a throne.
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4 The winged unicorn
Freedom, and the reach to touch people far away from him as well as near.
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5 Doves
White doves cross the middle of the painting, and one has settled on his shoulder.
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6 Flying apsaras
Two celestial musicians of the kind painted in the Dunhuang caves — one scattering flowers, one playing a harp.
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7 The lion
Power, and the respect he commands.
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8 The white tiger
Its companion on the right — the same claim, in the register Chinese painting reserves for guardians.
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9 Books
He is sitting on a stack of them, and one lies open at his feet.
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10 The leg he does not have
Xiang paints the prosthesis rather than around it. It is the only thing in the picture that is neither symbol nor animal.
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11 Mazie
His dog, painted from life and standing where a dog stands.
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12 The roses
Laid on the cover of A Beginner's Guide to the End.
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13 The eagle over the sea
Alone at the bottom, over black water, below everything else.
