Shi Jing’s works obviously stand apart from the so-called conceptuality of contemporary art! His works are the standard-bearers for self-practiced experimentation! The perspective we choose for decoding Shi Jing’s works is related to how we begin anew in pondering the quintessential issues of the relationship between man and art! In Shi Jing’s works, art is the product of the individual practice, with experience coming in second. He believes that a person’s intuition is a valuable thing. Intuition is often correct, but experience can be wrong, so he doesn’t believe in the stuff of experience. This is why his art begins with intuition. In those innocent pictures, he completely empties the colors and gets a feel for the connection between simple strokes and feeling. What he wants to get a feel for is the relationship between painting and person. What he emphasizes is the true spiritual feeling in reality.When the common audience encounters Shi Jing’s works, it may have no idea where to begin in reading them, because many dimensions are hidden within the images. The sensual perceptions created by visual misreading are impossible to put into words! Therefore decoding the meaning of his works is secondary, while the most proper, closest way for us to describe his works becomes more important. In the course of describing his works, the significance becomes fully apparent!We can use dimensional relationships to analyze Shi Jing’s works, as various parts of his works present different effects and understandings. If we dissect the three-dimensional space of a concrete painting, defining the front, left and right sides by how they create the image, then when we face the images of those gray and white series, we will feel that those images present murky, weak and cold impressions, and this is unsatisfactory in the many people’s experience, because we cannot properly and fully capture an image that we had blurrily seen but couldn’t put our finger on! This feeling is reminiscent of the world in which we live. With the reality we face, the things we see, the situations and phenomena, we can almost grasp something, but we can never really know its truth. In this head-on visual image, we can only see half a dimension, not even a single full one. It is incomplete; the other half-dimension is hidden, whereabouts unknown. But when our observational perspective is changed, as when we take a step, we notice that the entire image has undergone a virtual change and the form attains depth. An image that was once flat starts to appear as a concrete image with minute changes in lighting and shading. Sometimes it is almost as if we can perceive movement in those images he sketched. In those white works, we can feel this sort of perception, and if we step to the left or the right, special effects appear in the image, emerging as silver-white forms of some sort. This brings us a bit of joy, like when we suddenly discover something that was hidden. That’s a special kind of feeling, a happy one. Those images are clear yet skewed, and our satisfaction level is dropped a notch. To use the correct numbers, this perspective has 1.5 dimensions, because the skew subtracts 0.5 and the transparency subtracts another full dimension, leaving us with 1.5 dimensions. The left and right perspectives are each at the value of 1.5, and the images are opposite. So after we see the work, our minds put them together as a single image. This image appears concrete, but is still incomplete; this mental composite still falls short of 3 dimensions, only adding up to two.If we add all of the dimensional values in a work together, which is the overall perception of one of his works, this perception far surpasses the psychological vision that we get directly from other works. Those other works only have a three-dimensional spatial relationship, but Shi Jing’s works have reached 0.5+1.5+1.5+2=5.5 dimensions. That is the peculiarity that many people perceive when faced with one of Shi Jing’s works. We get the feeling that his works are different from the things we’re used to seeing, but we can’t decide from exactly where that difference arises. He set out from the research of artistic language, found a special method, and opened for us a door that leads to many windows into the spirit. This is a very narrow door, and few people succeed in finding it.In his black series we find a different kind of difference. His black paintings, like the Rembrandt series, were done under light. He was dabbling with the use of an oily finish to reflect the image. With these works, we can get a feel for the complex visual and psychological changes between when the light is on and when it is off. When the light is off, and we face it head-on, the image appears in an incomplete state, and this state is only 0.5 dimensions. When we turn on the light it is in full 3 dimensional effect, though it can only be seen within thirty degrees to the right or left. Once we leave this radius, the effect is gone. Past this field the image is once again incomplete, and we only get 0.5 dimensions. After viewing these works, we can once again synthesize a mental visual form. This form isn’t fully 3 dimensional, and we should define it as 2 dimensional.Then, in this series of works, the overall dimensionality from internal to external comes out to 6.5 degrees, as such: 0.5+3+0.5+0.5+2=6.5.This series of black works gives us something mysterious that reaches the soul. When the light is turned on, we see a definite image, but we cannot perceive the reality of this image, as it is a façade. When the light is extinguished, that incomplete image comes to mess with our vision; we always want to move the line of sight, hoping to find that hidden thing through a certain perspective. But what, after all, is that which was hidden? In this series of works, light has become a reasonable component of the painting.Shi Jing’s third experiment is embodied in works such as Black Forest and Waste Field. These works were made under a light or number of lights, and though they are also monochrome, this sketching could be done with no attention to the relationships of forms, instead they can be chaotically scribbled. He attempted to use the image’s light sensitivity to reach the level of a common digital camera, and create a distance from the light sensitivity of the human eye. He realized that there is a level between the human eye and the digital camera, which might be a gray zone that we previously ignored. He wanted to explore the potentials and scope of this gray zone. In this gray zone we discover that abstract expressionism, mysticism and realism all live within the same time and space, and that they are all mutually interchangeable.The dimensionality of these works should be explained in this way – from any perspective, the visual image is 0.5 degrees, whether the perspective is left, center or right. The digital image is a 3 dimensional effect, and our internal depiction is 2 dimensions, so this series still gives us 0.5+0.5+0.5+3+2=6.5 dimensions overall.From this series, we can see that the original work doesn’t have to be complete. Catalogues and media can be unreal. The real image and the broadcasted picture can be completely different things. When faced with such a situation, which do we believe? What is the true distance between the real and the false? It would seem that in these works what we perceive is not merely limited to visual differences and oddities. What it brings us has vastly transcended painting.In the entirety of our lives, what is it that makes us satisfied or unsatisfied? Among all the things we see throughout our lives, how much of it is real, graspable and lasting? How much of it is temporary, incomplete and fragmented? What, in the end, is the significance and value of our lifelong perceptions? What breadths of potential and mysterious realms are to be found in our spiritual world?When facing Shi Jing’s works, we are captured by an entirely different aesthetic. This stuff is different from so many powerful works that are commonly seen, works that have been correctly dubbed “conceptual”. They often give us a perception of the artist’s preaching, like the artist is preaching some kind of politics, culture or art. But we are often unable to understand what the work is directly presenting to us, so the artist must resort to the use of reasoning and explanation, to weave symbolic and extended meaning to convince us. When reading into these works, we must make use of text and language, and the visual directness often loses importance. Shi Jing’s works are actually an experiment in critique of this artistic trend, and on this level it is very valuable. He makes us once again consider the essential issues of the painting on the frame, and what contrast the visual art should have with such sciences as philosophy, political science and literature.Chinese contemporary art is a product of the western values system, but China’s current reality would lead westerners to the startling discovery that the Chinese have taken the originally transplanted history and turned it into a game of their own! Many western systems that have been adopted by China seem rigid and ill-fitted! So the Chinese began to create their own rules for history and the game. They ignore reason, only paying heed to utility and suitability! This kind of personal play attitude is quite apparent in Shi Jing’s works. This stuff has a strong native Chinese experience, and this experience holds genes from the playthings of traditional Chinese scholars. It is like how the Chinese can make endless variations with a brush and a piece of paper, and take so much joy from it; this is something that westerners just can’t understand. Today’s Chinese artists still have the genes of their ancestors’ traditions flowing inside them, no matter how much we look up to the west. Of course, this isn’t on the surface. It is essential, on the spiritual level, and it is avant-garde. In the Chinese contemporary art system, Shi Jing’s works stand in a particularly special category. They don’t set out from an external concept, but set off from the language of painting to enter into what he calls a realm of “visual contact”. As for where in the Chinese contemporary art system his original methodology should be placed, we should continue to explore.The exhibition opens on November 15, 2007 -2007, December 15 at Vanessa Art Center Jakarta.