Dust as Light is the third solo exhibition of Shi Zhiying, showcasing her oil paintings over the past one year.

Shi continues to strengthen her trajectory in practice, in a void of the real world dislocating agony and confusion. By applying brush strokes as a sensory tool, the artist approaches the most illusory outlines of all matters – light. The aura of the light appears as the outline of the parent body ever since the origin of the time. Everything is going back to the form of dust no matter what kind of symbolic significance it has ever been given. 

Dust as Light includes three paintings from “White Stone Buddha” series, and Shi’s latest works “Pantheon”, “The Pyramid”, and “The Temple of Heaven”. Depicting Buddha is the artist’s daily practice. As time accumulates, the transformation through repetitive practice generates a profound power that balances with the loose and purified airy atmosphere created by the strokes, to enrich the weightless light, and to defend hollowness. There is equality in principle between the man-made statues as abstract pivots for spiritual minds and architectures of power as performing stage for classes and systems. No immortal lasts forever, neither does art. Shi Zhiying takes the body of light as a measure of power, explores and exposes the most fundamental unit of the existing substances, as well as the dialectical relationship between visualized objects and meaningful illusions.

Shi Zhiying was born in Shanghai,China 1979. She graduated from oil painting department of Shanghai University Fine Arts College in 2005 and currently lives and works inShanghai. Her recent major exhibitions include My Generation: Young Chinese Artists in Tampa Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, USA.

*image (left)

courtesy of the artist and White Space Beijing