Special Projects: Pencil Walker: SHI Jin-Hua | Speaking About the Unknown by Ana Maria MICU

Mind Set Art Center is pleased to present you two special projects - Pencil Walker: SHI Jin-Hua and Speaking About the Unknown: Residency Project by Ana Maria MICU. 

Almost serving as SHI Jin-Hua’s second name, Pencil Walker, his behavioral art work, is a significant masterpiece created between 1996 and 2015. Shi walked back and forth in front of a 9.76-meter-long and 2.44-meter-tall wooden wall and left trace of 20 years of time with his pencil on it. Each of his creating session took 2 hours and 15 minutes. The process has challenged artist’s physical and mental balance and it has merged with his personal ascetic practice, turning indiscernible karma of life into physical pencil traces to complete the personal ritual of confession and repentance.

Compared with SHI’s combination of personal ascetic practice and art creation, the art works of Romanian artist Ana Maria MICU are inspired by mundane surroundings. Through keen observation toward space, plants and herself, she depicts intimate conversations among the details of life via drawings and paintings. Speaking About the Unknown is a residency project by MICU. An allegoric double self-portrait, staged in a silent dialogue, on a background of composting vegetable materials, is displayed adjacent to a botanical illustration, documenting vegetable debris collected on site, from species of plants unknown to the artist. Since these plants will undoubtedly look familiar to visitors, thus offering them the opportunity to come forward and provide more information on them, the artist’s intent is to encourage an elementary conversation base and from that, hopefully, to ease the way towards the topics of fading, disappearing, change and renewal.