Contemporary art is important because it gives form to the time we are living through now.

Every era leaves behind objects, images and stories that reveal what people valued, feared, questioned and believed. Contemporary art does that work for the present. It reflects the pressures of modern life while they are still unfolding.

This is why important contemporary art is not only about beauty or technical skill. It conveys something about the world that would be harder to understand without the artwork.

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds is an example. At first, the work looks like a vast field of identical seeds, but when you look up close, each one was handmade in porcelain. The piece brings together craft, mass production, Chinese cultural history, global trade and the tension between the individual and the crowd.

Kara Walker’s A Subtlety used sugar, scale and the setting of the Domino Sugar Factory to confront histories of labour, race, exploitation and desire. The work was not important because it was easy to look at. It was important because it made the building’s history impossible to separate from the viewer’s experience.

Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with an artificial sun. The work turned weather, light, atmosphere and collective behaviour into an experience people physically entered. It showed how contemporary art can create a shared moment rather than simply present an object.

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth cut a crack through the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The image was simple, but the meaning reached into borders, division, exclusion and the violence beneath public space.

These works matter because they do more than attract attention. They create images for ideas that are difficult to hold in ordinary language. They turn politics, memory, labour, technology, grief, identity and belonging into something people can stand in front of, walk through or remember years later.

Contemporary artists act as witnesses to the present. They process what the world is living through, then reflect it back through their unique perspective.

Ai Weiwei, Kara Walker, Olafur Eliasson and Doris Salcedo each gave public form to a question their time was asking. David Roman’s question is more personal: how can we transform our inner world while letting go of the need to control everything? He explores it through figures from myth and art history, such as the Vitruvian figure in Homo Luminous 03. Symbols like these can help us make sense of our own lives. He makes the work with gold leaf processes taken from sacred icon-making.