Studio Gallery is honoured to present artist Shi Yiran's solo exhibition Trigger Memories. It is the artist's first show at Studio Gallery, featuring nine of her latest acrylic paintings on paper on panel which continue her visual language in recent years.
Shi was born in Inner Mongolia and grew up in Hangzhou, China. In 2019, she was in residence as a visiting scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. Her continuing experience of living in a foreign land has led to a deeper understanding of human geography which influenced her work to gradually build up a unique painting language related to scenes, actions, and memories.
Indoor life scenes are depicted in all the exhibiting works based on the artist's daily living experiences mixed with fiction from film footage. The unordinary scene such as the strange landscape shown on the microwave, and a lizard on the office desk; those suspense film-like images is the most direct visual impression of Shi's work. Spiritual space is revealed through a physical ordinary environment depicted in the image; the layout of the furniture or the decorative objects can evoke the association of our daily lives and also can be seen as the aura leaked from the artist's spiritual world. The final artwork is a composite of multiple scenes from her extensive source library made up of daily shots. The artist transfers them with colour pencil on her daily journal filtering those space parts logically fit the painting in order to make the final result of a multi-dimensional effect between reality and illusion. The scene in the image is the most accessible bridge to communicate with the audience because our real life is constructed based on those scenes one after another. However, those scenes in Shi's work are neither a realistic portrayal of real life nor a surreal or dream-like depiction. Rather, it refers to the temporality created by the scene of what has passed and what will happen.
The tape has been used throughout Shi's working process. Like a filter or a sieve, the tape simplifies the depicted object, separating it from reality. Hard edges, gradient colours, and brush marks become the main attributes that form the object. It is the use of tape that makes such effects reasonable, intentionally or not, and transforms the action of "painting" into "making." From the pictures, we seem to see the objectivity clearly of mechanically produced objects such as telephones and glasses. Shi often starts painting from a specific part, which differs from the traditional way, closer to "hand making" a picture. Tape is used to create a shape or isolate an area, which enables unrestricted use of brush on the paper, and the brushstrokes seem more relaxing naturally. Each time of tape using objectively builds up a serial action, and the time lag here pauses the process of creating a complete and unified picture, rejecting an interpretation of the work simply from the image. We can easily associate with the artist's actions when looking at the unhidden traces caused by the removal of tapes.
Man is separated from the past (even from the past only a few seconds old) by two forces that go instantly to work and cooperate: the force of forgetting (which erases) and the force of memory (which transforms).
—Milan Kundera, The Curtain.
During the visit to Pittsburgh, USA, the colours used in Shi's paintings brightened up, inspired by that region's intense light. Cognitive change in the sense of human geography is meaningful, but the power of memorising and forgetting is fundamental to creating the picture. Shi's paintings unfold the construction site where the forces of memorizing and forgetting have worked together. That's why the images we gaze upon always seem realistic and illusory and why there is always a sense of immediacy of what has happened and what is about to happen. Through this exhibition, we would like to communicate with the audience about temporality as a concealed thread of Shi's work and how the scenes realised it.
Press release courtesy Studio Gallery.
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