SHI JIAYUN

In Shi Jiayun’s practice, she pictorialises 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 emphasises 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.