His recent series of oil paintings “Small Eye Look World” Shu Jie continues in his attempt to put the cyber culture into the context of the real world. He alters the images of popular and fashionable beauties he found over the Internet and puts fashion products, guns and luxurious things that people long for (for example, luxury cars and villas) alongside these girls. This juxtaposition creates a unique scene with a mixed sense of subtlety, colorfulness, desire, fashion, fragility, superficiality, violence, emptiness, boredom and helplessness. The artist chooses the most traditional medium of oil painting so that the scene would appear classical. With the help of this medium, Shu Jie successfully depicts a scene where reality and dream are broken into pieces by desire, technology, money, power and violence. This helps us to reflect on and face the reality in a cool-headed manner. Contradictions in real life are put into the virtual reality that Shu creates in these works, enticing viewers to take their own position in these conflicts and “fight” for their beliefs in a cultural and spiritual sense. It’s very likely that most viewers would fall into that “trap” he sets up. No matter what the reactions of viewers are, the images in these works will undoubtedly impress them greatly.

But in the new series, the artist puts small eyes on the faces of popular cyber-girls. These small eyes are not the result of his imagination. In fact, there are several members in the artist’s family with distinctively small eyes. Shu Jie talks with them regularly in family events and finds these people pretty and charming. Small eye thus becomes the most important feature of his new series. Small eye also represents an effective tool for him to look at the real world. As the eyes of these beauties are small, their ears, noses and mouths are also proportionally smaller, rendering them into a new genre of portraits, which are very innovative images totally different from the cartoon-like portraits popular in the current art world. 

we find all figures in his latest works have a pair of half-open, half-closed eyes that are narrowed into a slit instead of a couple of "meat balls". 

These works were first shown in his solo show "Small Eye Look World" that opened on August 17. Shu Jie abandoned his original medium of photography and chose oil painting to express himself. He replaced the digital output of programmed signals with the symbolism of easel painting. In the exhibition, audience found to their surprise that all six paintings featured lovely beauties instead of "horrible figures". The artist hasn't come up with any titles yet, but we could clearly see that this is another attempt made by the artist to "put cyber culture into the context of real-life culture". A strange scene was created by his juxtaposition of beauties and dolls on the canvases that convey a mixed sense of subtlety, colorfulness, desire, fashion, fragility, superficiality, violence, emptiness, boredom and helplessness.

The beauties with "small eyes" in the paintings don't look as abrupt or strange as the figures in the "Standard Internet Emotion Icons" series. They appear either greedy, or charming, or criminally sexy and represent our living conditions in the digital era in a strangely metaphorical manner. As Shu Jie pointed out, "small eyes" exist in the real world. But we are sucked into the swirl of a "virtual world", a world with "virtual" reality where everyone is in a dreamy state. Our stay in that world contributes to the "degeneration" of our senses, in particular our eyes. This organ responsible for supplying half of the knowledge and memories to our brain has received unprecedented threat and intrusion. 

Shu Jie filters out all the "horrible" aspects in his latest works and attempts to explore with small eyes the current era that integrates the virtual and real world, an era that makes a lot of people lose themselves. The virtual world provides a venue for a grand carnival to which everyone is invited. It can be compared to Prometheus that liberated the entire humanity and Judas that betrayed Jesus. The human civilization can further develop in the virtual world, yet it might become an ultimate graveyard for the human race. In the paintings of Shu Jie, previously closed eyes ("meat balls") were forced to open up to face the "truth". He successfully depicts a scene where reality and dream are broken into pieces by desire, technology, money, power and violence. The works have a sense of hallucination, bleakness and sexiness and the "eyes" in them record the harsh experiences of countless individuals, which is an integral part of the artist's spiritual pursuit. So I believe "small eyes" represent human desire and reveal truth in a detailed way.

Bai Yong, the curator of Shu Jie's solo show, once remarked, "Living in a booming concrete jungle with excessive goods, our eyes are getting smaller and smaller." As we are standing on the threshold of a visual revolution, the reflection of our inner-self brought about by the "small eyes" would keep us cool-headed and independent, which are very precious and rare qualities in this brand-new era.

The creation of "Standard Internet Emotion Icons" and "Small Eye Look World" shows that Shu Jie is both a thinker and doer. As a man of few words who has practically shunned himself from the artistic community in the past decade, the artist has constructed his own artistic language centering on human vision and encourages (or even forces) people in the carnival at the border between the virtual and real world to return to their "Id" and re-learn how to "think" with the help of the original human visual sense organ.