Shi Jin-Hua

Mind Set Art Center will launch a new exhibition titled “Shi Jin-Hua” on August 25 as part of our ongoing celebration of the gallery’s 15th anniversary. The event is also set to commemorate the career of the titular artist, who tragically passed away in a traffic accident in the summer of 2024. The exhibition will put on display key works from different periods of Shi’s career, most notably the “Pen Walking” series and its culmination piece, “Pencil Walker”, “Art Today”, which incorporates the idea of “walking” and “measurement”, as well as “One Thousand Days” and “Insulin Journey, October”. The show will also display the rarely exhibited oil painting that Shi deeply enjoyed making his later years. Thanks to generous loans from our collectors, we get to exhibit several pieces in the “Pen Walking” series for the first time in public. The exhibition is scheduled to run from August 16 to September 25, 2025. A panel discussion featuring curator Chen Hung-Hsing and collector Dr. Chen Po-Wen is set at 2:30 PM on opening day, August 16, followed by an opening reception at 4:30 PM. We cordially invite you to join this commemorative celebration.

Shi Jin-Hua was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at 17. He has since had to incorporate blood tests, documentation and insulin injection in his daily routine. After systematically studying conceptual art, this act of "measurement" - originally a necessity for his survival – was transformed into an opportunity to imbue his life with meaning and value. The artist converted these medical routines into artistic "form" to express his inner spiritual "contents", be it solemn and heavy, or humorous and lyrical. In his “Insulin Journal”, Shi, for a month, repeated a daily ritual in which he injected his required daily dose of insulin on watercolor paper and mix it with pencil strokes to create rhythmic lines with blurred bleedings. He ended up creating 31 clustered smudges that connect the artist's personal medical treatment with his artistic transformation, mapping his unique temporal and creative experience. His earlier work “One Thousand Days”, completed a decade ago, represents the fusion of his Buddhist faith with this measurement practice. As the title suggests, the work is the results of the artist’s one-thousand-day commitment during which he recited the "Namo Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva" one thousand times daily. Shi left blood droplets on Xuan paper, underneath which he recorded the number of chants. The entire work took over three years to complete. Each of the one thousand blood marks embodies the artist's spiritual concentration, they are the manifestation of the artist’s mental focus on one thing. For Shi, all the marks on paper ultimately converge to a single point in his mind, where “a sacred fig persists until its full growth”. Through these works, Shi has elevated the essential measurements preserving his physical life into ritualistic explorations and manifestations of his inner spirituality.