Preview｜21 - 22 March 2017
Performance｜3-4pm, 21 - 22 March 2017
Mind Set Art Center is delighted to present a solo exhibition “A 100 km Walk” by Shi Jin-Hua at the 2017 edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong.
The featured exhibition centers around Shi Jin-Hua’s project, A 100 km Walk and extends to the artist’s early drawings in dialogue with latest works. As a type 1 diabetic, “measurement” is not only essential for SHI’s survival, but also inspires his artistic practice along the way. A 100 km Walk was first executed in 2012 during the artist’s residency in National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan, and resumed in 2016 at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts. During the performance, Shi would walk back and forth on a ten meter long canvas laid on the ground in front of a ten meter wide canvas, on which he would draw with a pencil. Whenever the pencil is worn out, the artist would stop walking to hand sharpen it with a retractable blade he carries and then continue. The process would last for hours, during which pencil drawing develops on the wall and the artist’s footprints and graphite powders following from the pencil accumulate on the ground. The work will be completed when the artist walks up to 100 km, which is scheduled on the last day of preview of Art Basel in Hong Kong 2017. All pencil relics are going to a glass jar as part of the project.
Echoing with A 100 km Walk, early figurative sketches by Shi drawn before he approached conceptual art will also be on display. At the time of executing these sketches, the artist has already taken up walking as the main exercise to balance his blood glucose level. Those figurative drawings tell a lot about the haunting fears and frustration, and his needs to find a way out via art creation. Later on, Shi started the series of Pen Walking in 1994, handling and experimenting with running lines from various kinds of pen. He describes the consumption of a pen as a metaphor of life, whereby the pen is a subject and Shi himself is the assistant helping the pen to complete its mission of life. Shi has used tubes of oil paint as the object of personification in the latest works, in which he also goes back to the imagery and composition elements in his early figurative sketches, implying mental transcendence of the artist as well as different responses to confrontations and battles in life. The exhibition thus integrates performance, conceptual art and drawings, which states the interconnections between Shi’s life experience and “walking” as well as “measurement”.
In the FILM sector of Art Basel in Hong Kong 2017, Mind Set Art Center is pleased to present Cambodian artist Vandy Rattana’s film Monologue. Through the artist’s words directing at the sister he never met, Rattana takes us on a journey of an intimate reflection on the traumas of the recent history of his country.
