By Liang Qing

Traveling through a world of constant flux, what catches the eye is not only the landscape ahead but also the rearview mirror, constantly glimpsed from the corner ofher eye. In many of her previous series, Shi Yiran frequently depicts scenes of driving, using the reflections and refractions of intersecting surfaces to collect impressions from the journey. Here, the mirror becomes another key to understanding her work.

The mirror in Shi Yiran's work is not merely a spatial concept, but also a segmentation of time and motion—a visual bridge between the past, present, and future. She subtly lays out a labyrinth of mirrored overlays within her compositions; those multiple spaces that are thereby concealed or unfolded nestle her interests and research in visual culture and humanistic history. Among them, the most important space—"memory space"—is a realm of freedom where she continuously gains sensations and achieves breakthroughs. In Shi Yiran's paintings, place is always an indispensable fundamental element. Whether it be the topophilia, emotional geography that she has studied for years, or the native landscapes connected to her own origins, place always becomes the subject of the gaze because it carries and preserves culture and memory. For her, place, by virtue of its permanence, can overcome collective amnesia, while the ephemeral individual continuously revitalizes place through the memories generated by bodily habits. The ancient Roman sage Cicero once said, "The power of memory residing in places is immense." In his view, images and places are both the building blocks of memory. Shi Yiran, through the painting of images, seeks to resist the forgetting of collective consciousness—she reassembles wavering memories, thereby activating identity and even more dimensions of tradition.

In today's image-dominated networked society, people no longer rely on direct seeing to obtain perception, but instead accept reality through images on screens, following the operational principles of machines and computers—even though those images strive to present "reality," their seemingly free and unrestrained content is more often an illusion carefully filtered and calculated. Although Shi Yiran's paintings are also dynamic segmentations in the age of rapid screening, the scenes she assembles and bonds together through "fluid close-up views" possess a distinctive "painterly texture" because of irreplaceable subjective ideas, empathy that reaches directly into memory, and the materiality of brushstrokes. It is with this painterly texture that she resists the flick-through viewing of this fast-paced era. She embeds numerous codes yet to be deciphered in her paintings, in which each mirror hints at a larger system.

Beyond the frame of the rearview mirror lies a wider world, yet it is always overlooked by the forward-focused consciousness. The rapidly receding past may be even more captivating than the surging new landscapes ahead. It seems that Shi Yiran is reminding us by her unceasing backward gaze, that no matter how rapid we advance, a bewitching past always lingers, following close behind.