From March 22 to July 14, 2024, Yuz Museum will host a grand solo exhibition of the Chinese artist Shi Zhiying, “Stones and Stories”. Organized by Yuz Museum in close collaboration with the artist, the curator Dr. Shen Qilan and the architect Wang Qing (from Origin Architecture), this exhibition features around 50 paintings created by Shi Zhiying between 2010 and 2024, aiming to present a cohesive narrative of the artist’s practice during this period. The exhibition also explores a new approach to creating an exhibition – gradually taking form through mutual inspiration among the artist, the curator, the designer, and the museum, making it a “generative” exhibition.
After graduating from Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, Shanghai University with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in oil painting, Shi Zhiying embarked on her career as a professional painter at Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute. Over years of creation, the exploration of the essence and language of painting has always been the focus of her practice. Drawing inspiration from both Eastern and Western art history, she adeptly captures the life-movement of the spirit through the rhythm of things and inner logic of breath emphasized in Chinese painting through the language of oil painting, utilizing color, texture, and brushstrokes. Whether depicting the sea, sand, and grass with monochromatic brushstrokes in her early works, or exploring subjects like stones, figures of Buddha, and landscapes with richer colors in her recent creations, she portrays the form of objects with refined language based on the imitation of nature, expressing the nature of things. For Shi Zhiying, the essence of painting transcends more than imagery; it possesses flesh, touch, and materiality. Like a writer translating what they see and experience into words, her paintings are a subtle “translation” of her touch and perception of the world, as well as a direct expression of her emotions. Infinite brushstrokes construct boundless oceans and stones – carriers and mediums for the stories, that reconnect the self with the world time and time again.
Through seven journeys, the exhibition will showcase Shi Zhiying’s understanding of lines, shapes, colors, figures, and materiality. She invites viewers into “The Story of Lines”, “The Story of Shapes and Colors”, “The Story of Weight”, “The Story of Nature of Things”, “The Glass Ball Game”, and “The City of Illusions”. To enter the world and aura created by Shi Zhiying, the journey may start from any painting or stone. Between narrative and non-narrative, between reality and illusion, between mind and imagination, each viewer will recognize their own oriental story. The exhibition’s design echoes its theme, making up the seventh story. Integrating the artworks’ context and the museum’s spatial style, Wang Qing designed the circulation as a loop, allowing visitors to explore without a set viewing order. Seats scattered around the central circular space of the main hall, radiating outward like ripples, invite visitors to enter the stories and experience Shi Zhiying’s way of painting and the magic of this exhibition.
As the Chinese title suggests, the inspiration for this exhibition stems from the Nouvelles Orientales by French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. In one of the stories written in 1936, a painter immersed himself in his own world of painting, even transcending life and death, and eventually “disappeared into the ocean blue as the sky”. Shi Zhiying admires the end of this story – the heaviness of the ending in a sense of the real world achieves a weightless escape through the imaginary ocean depicted by the painter. Inspired by this, during the exhibition’s preparation in early 2024, Shi Zhiying completed two small-scale paintings titled Sky Blue Ocean and Sea No. 2. These two works continue her contemplation of the interchange of appearance with disappearance in her painting practice, while also echoing the story in an intriguing manner. She revisits themes that she began exploring over a decade ago, seeking new possibilities in painting through continuous self-questioning and experimentation. In the words of the curator Shen Qilan, “This is the most enchanting aspect of the oriental tales, and the art that Shi Zhiying tirelessly pursues: being without dwelling, yet giving myriad thoughts; transcending oneself, like crossing the river with a single reed.”