There is no miracle, right?  Not quite.  Angélique Shidi is a miracle, or at least the way she made herself a visual artist sounds like a miracle.  I was told that she was a gemologist by training and had won awards in that area of profession.  But all of a sudden she reshaped herself by immersing in water and colors and then surprised us by water-coloring whatever stimulates her inborn or cultivated sensitivity at the right moment. She responds to the call from within and allows the mental to unfold in the visible.
　　Visible?  Yes and no.  Yes, you see colors and shapes, lines and shades, thickening spread, widening focus.  But you can hardly see the inherent richness of her works from a chosen point of view.  How can you view anything without a point of view?  So perhaps you do take a point of view, but that is an ever-floating point. The flow carries your mind away from what you take to be the “right” one and send you on a new journey that leads to infinite possibilities. These possibilities are forever beyond the scope of the visible.
　　It’s fine to call Angélique Shidi an oriental artist, but that wouldn’t lead you in the right direction.  You may also be tempted to give her a ready label of abstractionist, but that wouldn’t be much enlightening either.  You surely don’t see human or animal images in her painting, but do you then really see water and foliage, jade and marble, clouds and hills, beaches and waves?  There is no certainty to be reached, so we’d better forget about any attempt to categorize her style or her genre either in form or in contents.  After all,Angélique  Shidi is one of a kind by herself, or a unique spirit that defies classification. She looks into herself, and then distances what she sees from herself, then distances herself from what she sees, and then lets the self and the other merge into one and the same moment again.  She goes astray for the sake of return, and returns to her strayed nature.  Astray and strayed?  Well, it might be just the opposite. No one dares to claim that he/she has the final words about Angélique Shidi’s nature, or the nature Angélique  Shidi is confronting, so long as Angélique Shidi continues to reshape herself with surprising moves.
　　You might be crystal clear about the aesthetic milieu in which you are enclosed, but the inherent vagueness of Angélique Shidi’s artistic language could put you in a state of ambivalence and indecision.  It is out of this kind of multivocal abundance that comes the lure of Angélique Shidi’s painting. You can jump into or escape from it, but there is no way you can ignore or disregard it.  Angélique Shidi’s naivety and innocence would lead you to see what you have been hiding from yourself, and the fading area of your mental world could be vitalized by Angélique Shidi’s unbounded freedom witnessed in the strokes and veins of her works.
 　　Delighted by the sheer elegance, you attempt to ask questions in face of Angélique Shidi’s painting, but before you find an angle you are already overwhelmed by questions from the painting in the first place.  That is, you are questioned before you pose questions.  As soon as the dynamic process between the viewer and the imagery is triggered, you are vesting in the realm of fantasies, fantastic but sensible.  You could be a hasty spectator or a discriminative aesthete, but you are not going to be indifferent to the call from within.  Please try to take Angélique Shidi’s works as a treat of delicacies and a retreat from the mundane, then you’ll be gratified. 
　　　　　　　　　　　　　               Zhenming Zhai Professor of Philosophy

作者：,Zhai,ming,Zhen