Beijing Commune is pleased to present Shi Jiayun's first solo exhibition with the gallery “Shi Jiayun,” showcasing the artist's most recent paintings. Traversing between material dots and painting surfaces, patterns and objects, and shapes and modeling, the interconnections among the works in this exhibition suspend the idea of the figure. At its core, the exhibition explores the relationship between medium and representation, painting and visual mechanism, and between the individual and the image.
With the sky signaled by the blue background, Leaf-TYO and Iron Fence-LON seem undoubtedly plein-air, yet they are devoid of vicissitudes of light and weather. It is not a naturalistic light but an even one that illuminates the views both in the foreground and background, in the light and shadow, outdoors and indoors. On the other hand, glistening dust seem to be scratches on the paint; in the more abstract-looking paintings, enigmatic bright or dark flecks brim as if hovering over the image; reflections in, for example, the Wood Grain-SHA and Iron Fence-LON similarly obscure textures of these objects. Ambiguous shapes of fibers and spots that would otherwise disrupt and inflict the representations beneath appear as figures in Shi’s work.
Titled after the subject and location, paintings in this exhibition consult the photos the artist took in different places around the world, the zoom-in perspective of which deprives the environment and contexts. “Editing” the images through painting, Shi weaves the inadvertent connections between visual fragments from her everyday viewing into the interconnectedness of the works: the reflection on wood board and sunset, the floral-like fence and skyward branches, the textile pattern and the pistil, and more. For the artist, shapes, colors, lights, or objects incorporated all as visual materials in her work are independent of and exist only because of each other. With her eyes that do not ‘presuppose the “figured figure”,’[1] Shi connects the visual fragments through her experience.
The works in this exhibition make extensive use of dots of varying precision. In some grittier paintings, these dots seem to be image noise alienating the viewer from the representations. Similarly to the noises implying the failure of the photograph to “annihilate itself as medium”, [2] Shi’s work raises the question about the homogeneous and even surface of the painting. At the same time, a closer look, probably from the side, unveils a very slight undulations of the landscape of those dots. For the artist, these dots resemble subtle substances that adhere so closely to the surface of an object, such as the dust on the transparent glass in Dust-Lon. When one is immersed in the world behind the showcase and the focus is suddenly drawn upon the dust, it is as if one is pulled back to reality. For Shi, the dots on the canvas connect the painting with reality.
[1] Georges Didi-Huberman: Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art
[2] Roland Barthes: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
