Shi Jin-Hua

Mind Set Art Center will launch a new exhibition titled “Shi Jin-Hua” on August 16 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.

Shi Jin-Hua's “Pen Walking” series, which originated in 1994, stems from an intimate moment of artistic epiphany. While writing his journal, the artist noticed his pen's ink gradually fading - realizing this longtime companion was nearing its end, he drew lines across paper until the ink depleted, creating the seminal “Pen Walking #1”. He accompanied the drawing with a poem, titled “The Last Drawing of His Life - To the pen who spent his entire life keeping me company”. This poignant act marked both the genesis of his iconic series and the beginning of his artistic exploration of "walking" as conceptual practice. The series has since gone through significant iterations: “Pen Walking #44”, created in 2008, features unbridled free-handed lines, with pencil shavings from the process deliberately glued to the paper as a metaphor of a life depleted. “Pen Walking #105” from 2011 represents a conceptual breakthrough - instead of abstract lines, Shi inscribed his own name across a piece paper two meters wide, critically interrogating how an artist’s signature affects the work’s artistic and market value (notably, all works in the “Pen Walking” series remain unsigned, as Shi considered the series conceptual performance art; signatures appear only on accompanying documentation).

Often considered the culmination of the “Pen Walking” series, Shi Jin-Hua’s “Pencil Walker” was completed between 1996 to 2015. The piece saw the artist walking back and forth in front of a wooden wall standing at 9.76 meters across and 2.44 meters tall. As he walked, Shi dragged a pencil across the wall while reciting the Buddhist scripture, the “Heart Sutra”. Each session lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes, challenging his physical and mental balance while merging art-making with his deeply personal ascetic practice. Shi Jin-Hua performed a total of 60 sessions of “walking”, “drawing” and “recital”. And over 20 years, the accumulated pencil marks completely covered the once-pristine white wall, turning it into a reflective, inky black surface that symbolizes the accumulated misdeeds from the walker’s many past lives. Shi used up one pencil after another during the creative process, leaving countless bits of pencil shavings on the wall – his way of transforming the formless karma of life into visible pencil traces, reaching purification and redemption for the mind.

Shi Jin-Hua never ceases to gaze into death and ponder the ephemerality of life during his artistic journey. His two notable works, the oil painting “Carcass of Beef”, created before the global pandemic, and “Sumeru Mountain”, made during the lockdown, respond to the subject of death respectively from the art history perspective and from his personal point of view. The artist unfortunately passed away on June 28, 2024. The artist once expressed his sentiment on life’s ephemeral nature after decades of artistic and Buddhist practice, “If a pen is a metaphor of a man’s life, then what kind of contour have I drawn for my lives in the never-ending wheel of Samsara？ If the cycle of birth, aging, illness, and death never stops repeating, does it make sense to work hard to create meaning in life? … Living a life as such, you have not transcended. You have desire and hatred, and you hate yourself somewhat. Therefore, you hushed. And your silence is the pen.”