Shi Yong navigates the complexities of cultural and economic systems with an analytical, often humorous edge.
Read MoreIn Made in China —Welcome to China (1999), Shi paints an idealised image of a Shanghai resident onto plaster models of a waving businessman wearing a Mao suit. This image was created by Shi collaboratively through an internet project that asked volunteers to vote on the look of the ideal citizen. In this series, Shi considers notions of commodification and the acceleration of modern Chinese consumerism.
Shi is well-known for his documenta-related billboard proposals, Sorry, There Will Be No Documenta in 2007 (2006). Having worked in the advertising industry, Shi's interest in the power of language is formalised in his documenta work, a virtual billboard series that responded to the mania surrounding selection for the internationally recognised exhibition. Through proposing that the artists, curators, critics, public, and market take a break from art, Shi subverts the capitalist system that supports the art apparatus.
The politics of poetry is contemplated in Shi's theatrical neon installation A Bunch of Happy Fantasies (2009). This work recreates a Chinese poem titled A Rose Made From Water, written by his friend in an opium-fuelled drug haze. Each orange neon sign is an upside-down handwritten character, materialising a fantasy of delusional thinking out of his friend's mumbled speech. This fantasy is difficult to decipher, with Shi shifting the semantic value of the text into neon visual pleasure, suggestive of a romanticised urban nightscape. As with Shi's earlier works, A Bunch of Happy Fantasies considers this manipulation of our sensory perception a consequence of urban modernisation.
For his pared-down geometric abstractions in Under the Rule (2017), Shi uses the forms and actions of what he describes as the 'combined vocabulary of violence and ornament ... dismantling, slicing, welding, reshaping, painting the surface' to break down objects into constituent parts.
Automotive elements are reconfigured into 18 parts presented in a row, like hieroglyphs — car doors, engine parts, a chassis, and exterior siding are painted in pristine neutral tones. Through radically altering a junkyard Volkswagen, Under the Rule abstracts the object's relationship to the body, serving as a metaphor for the body's fragmentation under capitalist culture. Shi describes this as a sense of pain 'covered up by the superficial "beautiful" skin', reflecting the ways that our bodies are controlled by reality.
