Shi Yiran was born in 1983 in Inner Mongolia. She graduated from Department of Oil Painting in China Academy of Art (CAA) with a PhD (2017). She was a visiting scholar at the Department of History of Art and Architecture in University of Pittsburgh (2019) and is currently an associate professor at Department of Oil Painting in China Academy of Art (CAA).
Shi Yiran specialises in depicting a ‘supersensory’ world that remains true to realism but with a peculiar charm. She is committed to exploring the semantics of colour itself, realising a sense of grammar within her ultra-colour gamut that creates an ever-emerging reality. The details of her figuration melt into the whole, returning to a kind of simplicity in painting. She borrows the technique of colour layering from printmaking, allowing the brushstrokes to become mere intervals, thus revealing the dimension of time more clearly. She also uses collage in a restrained manner to intervene in the paintings with traces from industrial and print culture. These act as fragments from different image systems and create surrealist poetry with the collision of produced marks and written strokes.
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