Shi Zhiying was born in Shanghai in 1979 and now works as a first-level artist at the Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute. Shi Zhiying is well-known for stark monochromatic paintings of uniform vistas, such as open stretches of ocean, sand, and grass.
She deals with the state of existence of objects in her painting, emphasizing in her practice the mutual transformation between appearance and disappearance. Her paintings reveal the textures and volumes of water, rock, containers, Buddha statues and beads – real objects that are nonetheless indefinite, composed merely of independent lines, brushstrokes and color; visual combinations with their own inherent rhythmic logic that interacts with how it is experienced to form a stable yet sensitive structure. Through her smooth and insightful painting techniques, the artist showcases the instantaneousness of creation and dissolution of things and captures the creeping transition that takes place in the space between objects, the plane of the canvas, and states of feeling.