Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalist

In the past, painstaking labor permeated the art practice of Shih, Jin-Hua, but recently this has changed. Shih positions the material aspect of art within the logic of commodity exchange, exposing art mechanisms and the inevitability of market manipulation. While it seems he is playing a game with the system, Shih is actually taking on serious issues of integrity by asking us to consider how the logic of the art market operates. Using the term “alchemy” in the work's title, Shih ritualistically cuts down or reduces his work  to ingeniously critique the violence of the symbolic sign and the obsessive compulsive nature of transaction in capitalist society. Committee member: Chen, Tai-song

Artwork Introduction

Shi's ongoing conceptual art project “A Trilogy of Contemporary Art Alchemy” dissects the commerce of art by wryly questioning how the system of art and the art market works. For the work, all the invited participants: artists, gallery owners, art collectors, art critics, art curators and art journalists were asked to play their usual role. Even though this was a tiny scale, the results adhered to the reality of the art world and were documented via art exhibitions and published art criticism.

When the global financial crisis seriously hit the art market in 2008, art galleries began staging joint exhibitions with artworks priced much lower than usual, which prompted Shi to take his artwork valued at 120,000NTD and cut a quarter of it so that the small fragment was now priced at 30,000NTD and the larger at 90,000NTD. This action then became the first episode of the Trilogy and was titled “The Cost of An Art Concept.”

For another low-price exhibition, the artist cut a U.S. dollar coin in half and attached one to a canvas. Titled “Half Dollar,” it sold exactly for a half dollar. Unfortunately, the gallery could not offer him his usual 50 percent commission as Taiwanese currency does not have quarters, so he urged the gallery to buy some bread, and after meticulously weighing it, he cut away precisely twenty-five cents worth. This became the second episode of the Trilogy titled “The Earnings of ART.”

The final episode, “The Scheme for the Cover of An Art Journal,” involved a local art magazine. The artist traded artworks of the Trilogy in exchange for his project to be published on the cover, along with several published art reviews of the work.

About the Artist

Conceptual artist Shi, Jin-Hua was born in 1964 and lives and works in Kaohsiung. He received his MFA from the University of California at Irvine in 1994.

Shi has exhibited widely around the world. His solo exhibitions include “Pen Walking” at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2008) and “Watch Steps” at The Art Gallery, University of California at Irvine (California, 1996). He participated in numerous group exhibitions such as the “Taipei Biennial 2010” where he exhibited his ongoing project “A Trilogy of Contemporary Art Alchemy” and “Second Vision Visa for Thirteen” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center MoMA (New York, 2004).