Pure and heavy colors, unbridled strokes, all elements in her canvas, mass and stroke, are vivid and poetic, which are growing and struggling to break the frame. Shi Zhiying’s works always have rich elements vividly beyond her age and gender, even beyond the times she lives.

It’s hardly to evaluate those works only with a simple word -- rich imagination. They can be called the anima recording with an unusual narration to record her mysterious “nightmare”. Just as she said: “I have no idea whether I gave my works life or I only found a place where I can be autoecious in it.”

As a result of the development of IT technology and Bio technology, an immense gap lies across between the past history and our times, we can neither achieve sagacious dialog with our ancient philosopher, nor have any “historical prototype” to guide our future, even art history is defined as post modern nowadays. However, Zhiying will still face to an unfathomable ancient well to draw the source from ancient history. In her paintings, the canvas smelled the breath of primeval age, the forgotten era of mythology, grandiose ancient battlefield and the ancients’ “foolish” worship for their religions. More amazing is that she represented them with an abstract mode, which she refused to simply defined as “post-modern mode”. She decodes those scenes, which became mysterious according to disappearance, with codes of our age. Her works are alive. Hanging up the front of carbon black background with strong beam of spotlight, the forgotten history was illuminated and propelled from the unfathomable depths to close the audience.

Shi Zhiying’s paintings are returning an ancient tradition that was always in connection with religions, totemism, battle recording and the curiousness of unknown universe in immemorial “painting”. Her painting is strong at narration usually contained in historical legends and stories, which she was lively representing her historia through combination of her allegorical colors and strokes. She treats all her works as an inseparable grand novel or epic, and these exhibited works are only a prelude of Genesis in this magnificent creation.

An atmosphere of perplexity and a longing for unknown world dominated Shi Zhiying’s paintings which are unconsciously influenced by “Integration of Nature and Man”, a fundamental proposition of ancient Chinese philosophy and Plato’s aesthetics concept – Illusionism. She has extremely fascinated in “magic” and “psychic” whom we usually just practice in jest.

She believes in a might that can drive our human beings to propagate generation after generation in this planet and that also drive her to represent what she called as “original” at her works (as Plato believe that only the “original” world is the realest one and only those people who have the courage to search and interpret the essence of it are the true realist). The significance of her works, her obsession of myth, her persistence of faith and her seeking for ego are all beyond her painting itself.

Facing to her works, which is dominated by the classical charm so that the audience will have some beyond-spatio-temporal experience. She is much as an artist, who was thrown from a vast abyss of remote history to current China where Chinese dominators of contemporary art are impassioned exhibiting their “sociality” and “critical thinking” under the slogan – “Artistry is not important for art”. She puts her sight to her mysterious soul and her spiritual home and meanwhile focuses on the ancient history and mysterious powers, using modern art expressions to recur the abstract history and to express a longing and an illusion for returning to submerged past. It is a spirit of desire for magnificence, pietistic expression for sacred religions and fetishistic adherence of beliefs that attributed to the Renaissance.

Believe and inspire, these two verbs are most frequently used in Shi Zhiying’s t alk. That is a belief in what she persists and what she creates and an inspiration of some pristine and persistent faith. For certain, creation with whole life and entire faith can give us much heart quake than only with passions, since the passion will fade out, but the faith can last as long as transcend the end of an individual’s existence. The history tells us that any creations, which have distinguished characteristics, must be weighed by life, sustained by faith and validated by time.

Young Michelangelo created his immortal masterpieces “Creation Scenes” in Sistine Chapel, and we hope that Zhiying can also have the opportunity to create her creation scenes in a great space to where she belongs.

Jimmy Wang