The evolution of images has accelerated its transition from the bridge between the self and the external world into a concrete, physical external reality. The lived reality shaped by the intensive consumption of photographic images has become more immediate and authentic than the reality captured within photographic images themselves. Within this space, constructed by increasingly minute actions in daily life, public and private, time and distance, have become descriptive attributes to be constantly arranged and mobilized. These experiences, which no longer rely on the individual’s most direct perception of the world, often seem to be excluded from the realm of authentic experience; yet this is how we live and perceive today. Shi Jiayun’s latest exhibition, “ Revisit”, consciously enters into such a complex field of experience, and through the production of painted images, continuously reflects on the meaning of images and on the ways experience is formed.
In Shi Jiayun’s practice, she pictorializes fragments of reality, imbuing them a certain image-based aesthetic quality: wooden boards resembling water ripples, folds in fabric that resemble flower stamens, dust that resembles nebulae, stains that resemble abstract paintings, and so on. But this is not a poetic sublimation of life; it is a series of coincidences in the world. While her earlier work utilized found images, her recent paintings revolve around photographs she has taken herself, including photographs of pre-existing imagery. These photographic images are unquestionable proof of personal experience. These coincidences are not romantic associations, but a real condition of existence. These images of reality are both the departure point and the destination of her painting: for Shi Jiayun, the image is the sole reality that painting must confront.
In this exhibition, Shi Jiayun emphasizes the formal relations between the paintings. Yet this relation does not stem from a temporal continuity within the creative process itself; instead, it establishes accidental coincidence as the governing rule. The artist presents a project composed of five works, each depicting scenes from different times and spaces that reflect varying scales of life—ranging from intimate details to distant, unreachable horizons. These scenes are able to exchange and communicate across time and space, creating a fluid state continuously activated through such exchanges. Through these shifts, changes, and the handling of them, Shi Jiayun’s work reveals the fluidity that stimulates life. In the editing of images, form and sensibility constantly collide with and revise reality, allowing the virtual to find a place of respite and breath.
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“structure”
text/Shi Jiayun
The standalone project in this solo exhibition is titled “ structure ”, originated from my earlier works on paper. While I was studying in New York, I attended a major Cy Twombly retrospective that featured approximately eighty works on paper, spanning from his Black Mountain College years to the period shortly before his death. Following that experience, I began creating my own series of abstract works on paper; the title Structure serves as a textual trace of my reflections on the structural logic within Twombly’s practice.
This project is indeed built upon a clearly defined framework. It is presented through five paintings, each measuring 70 x 100 cm—a scale conceived to invite the viewer to step in and engage closely, while also allowing for a degree of deliberate human intervention.
In the first painting of Structure, I sought to transcribe the specific qualities of my earlier paper-based works into the medium of oil. My aim was to capture the immediacy of colored pencil and collage, the tactility of the paper surface, and even the compressed traces left by the scanner. This work serves as the project’s point of departure: it is simultaneously an image of a painting and a painting of an image. For the second work, I took the visual outcome of the first painting as a foundation to “trigger” the reference image for the next, continuing this logic across all five paintings. The challenge lies in locating a photograph—among a pre-existing pool of images—that maintains a visual correspondence with the previous work; it is a process of continually contending with the resistance of uncertainty. As in my earlier practice, all reference images were taken on my phone. They were not generated from the preceding results; rather, they already existed and were subsequently “activated” by the memory of images.
As a concentrated, small-scale articulation of the key concerns in my recent practice, Structure functions both as a footnote and an opening. Its source images emerge through acts of memory, whether triggered or captured, and I follow those mnemonic traces in order to edit and transform them through different painterly approaches.
