[Press Release]
In this show Shi Jing continues his career-long experimentation with time and light which began decades ago when found a job doing stage lighting for a travelling theater troupe.
While in this role he became interested in how the play of light on the surfaces of objects caused them to appear differently before our eyes. His recognizable style involves herding quantities of paint around the canvas so that the brushstrokes and the differences in paint texture construct an image on the canvas without the benefit of color.
In this show, he pursues a conceptual exploration of light, of security cameras, TVs and reflective surfaces. His latest installation piece features a 24-hour news channel projected on to a mirror ball, which disperses it into a rainbow of hues reflecting off the walls of the gallery. It is through this process that Shi Jing completely negates the content of the broadcast.
In the second part of the show Shi Jing turns this process around. Instead of projecting, he captures footage with the use of a CCTV camera which captures footage which is then projected into the gallery. The work makes obvious reference to the idea of surveillance, but at the same time his renderings of the objects and characters in his paintings are so faint that they barely could serve as a form of court documentation.
In fact what Shi Jing manages to capture is the transience of life — the brief passage of these individuals through a space (OV Gallery) at a specific time (the period of prior to the show opening). The only trace left of these places and people are their spectral images, which haunt the canvas.
The third element of the show is a series of paintings of asteroids floating in an inky black space framed with built-in lighting. What intrigued Shi Jing was the idea that these images (taken from an astrology fan site) could only depict the appearance of asteroids thousands of light years away, and that they had likely greatly changed in appearance, or even burned out of the atmosphere by the time of the opening of the show.
The exhibition titles “The Remains of the Day” (English) or “24 Hours” (Chinese) refer not only to the 24-hour news channel, but also the fleeting nature of current events and also our lives, which, like asteroids, have a finite lifespan.
Here Shi Jing conjures up Buddhist doctrines of impermanence and the belief that time is a construct of the mind. The universe, unlike the human mind has no bounds, but stretches out into infinity.
