During the 1970s and 1980s, Ai undertook repeated journeys to the Tibetan Plateau. For the artist, this vast and austere landscape was not merely a subject for plein-air observation, but a site of existential projection.Influenced in part by the American realist painter Andrew Wyeth, Ai Xuan developed a distinctive “poetic realism,”synthesising Western representational techniques with an Eastern introspective sensibility. In his works, Tibet is no longer a picturesque landscape, but rather an enduring allegory of solitude, time, and existence. Painted in 1989, Sounds Getting Away articulates this mature visual language with clarity and restraint. A solitary figure stands against a vast, snow-covered expanse, their expression calm yet detached, gaze directed toward an unreachable horizon. The boundless white terrain is rendered in stark contrast to the finely described textures of the foreground, generating a suspended and profound sense of time. The “fading song” thus becomes more than the disappearance of sound; it signifies the sublimation of memory and emotion into silence, transformed into an unending inner resonance.