BIOGRAPHY
Yichu Shi is a contemporary painter whose practice explores sensory experience, material processes, and human–nature relations through abstraction and material-led painting. She was born into a family with a close relationship to the natural environment, spending extended periods of time in mountains and by lakes during her childhood. These early experiences continue to inform her intuitive choices of colour, material, and surface.
Shi’s work is grounded in the belief that nature possesses an abstract atmosphere capable of generating quiet temporal and psychological spaces—spaces in which self-awareness and reflection can emerge. Rather than depicting nature representationally, her paintings seek to translate sensations, moods, and embodied impressions drawn from natural encounters into subtle visual and material structures.
Working with layered pigments, absorptive surfaces, and unstable or responsive materials, Shi creates compositions that appear simple at first glance yet unfold gradually through sustained attention. Repetition, soft boundaries, and material variation are used to construct ambiguous spatial fields that invite viewers into a slowed perceptual experience. Her works function as metaphorical environments—spaces of abstract emotion in which viewers are encouraged to encounter their own sensations, memories, and states of awareness.
Shi strongly resonates with the idea that “people will not fight to save what they do not love.” Rather than framing her practice as environmental advocacy, she approaches painting as a means of cultivating intimacy, care, and attentiveness toward the natural world. Through sensory engagement and material presence, her work seeks to foster deeper, more nuanced connections between viewers and nature, offering moments of quiet contemplation and sustained reflection in an increasingly accelerated and instrumentalised world.
She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, and a BA in Oil Painting from Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in the UK, China, and Europe.