Watching her series from Dolphin Hotel, Peacock Town, All Recruits to Mirage, the audience will find that almost all of these are the artist’s changing experiences in various fields, as well as emotional growth in relation to it. The area she understands is not an abstract resemblance, nor limited to a landscape with a purely spatial dimension, but a complex landscape that can be perceived as deepened and layered in time. The landscapes constructed by the interweaving of natural sceneries and humanistic elements bring her a contrasting visual density and sense of colour. The implicit information is released through her emotions.

These emotions come from the immediate feelings while traveling and the elusive experience of those places. The frequent and lengthy travels to exotic places made Shi Yiran withdraw from the familiar continuity of real life. Leaving and wandering allowed her to temporarily leave the pre-existing structure that preset by culture and experience, thus opening up the exploration of the exotic space in her heart. Her paintings are no longer static “sceneries in the frame”, but unfold into multiple dimensions of movements and stillness, truth and illusions at the same time — the objectivity in our life, the “mimic environment” shaped by the media, the existence of “subjective reality” in consciousness… It is through her visual translation and piecing-and-separating with montage techniques that Shi Yiran reassembles these complex and layered realities. She activates imagination in the ambiguity between figuration and abstraction, and various indescribable feelings are closer to reality than blindly realistic depictions.

Leaving represents a place where its connection to us ceases to exist, and the resulting stream of real-time, wonderful, complete memories will unknowingly vanish. However, fleeting reality always resides intangible things, through which we could identify and call out the past. Shi Yiran’s works are like coordinates or monuments of spiritual travel, allowing us to reminisce about the journeys that we could walk freely. The freedom of roaming and traveling in the past has gradually drifted away. Compared with the various closed barriers in the “post-epidemic” era, the environments flowing in her paintings have become a psychological extension of the past, exuding a beautiful and warm sadness. At the same time soothing. The things that we gazed at before, will be bringing back to us again, with our sights and every plenitude picture. Standing in front of Shi Yiran’s works, we may also have a flashback unconsciously:that place is like a dream, but it is also close to us.