Chi Huai Shih

Lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan

Artist statement

My practice begins with the instability of perception: how sensation becomes form, and how what we perceive changes when the conditions of seeing shift. My paintings initially emerged from bodily sensations that precede language. Through gesture, touch, movement, and accumulation, these experiences become visible forms. Over time, however, my attention has shifted from what is felt within the body toward the position from which perception occurs. This shift has led me to explore recognition, orientation, and transformation. A mountain may feel remembered while belonging to no actual place; its atmosphere and density may change until "seeing mountain as mountain" becomes "seeing mountain as no longer mountain." Elsewhere, drawing on the phenomenological idea of the horizon, orientation itself becomes unstable: without a definitive top or ground, a work can establish a different horizon as it turns. I am increasingly interested in the point at which perception does more than alter how something appears. If the position from which we understand something changes, can that thing enter a different state of being? More recently, this question has extended toward the instability of form itself: can something be in the process of becoming while, at the same time, losing what once allowed it to remain itself? Painting remains my primary medium, alongside a long practice of Sogetsu ikebana. Its attention to direction and ma, the interval through which elements acquire relation, has...

Artwork