Shi Jin-Hua is widely recognized as one of the most important conceptual and performance artists to emerge from Taiwan. His work was grounded in existential questions: how to live with illness, how to locate meaning within constraint, and how ritual could serve as both discipline and revelation. For Shi, art was not an outcome; rather, it was a way of living. Diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of seventeen, Shi transformed the daily rituals of blood-sugar testing and insulin injection with Buddhist practice into a distinctive artistic language.
During his 2003-2004 MoMA PS1 artist residency, Shi developed the Living Beyond Measurement series, wherein measurement evolved from medical necessity into a critical interrogation of systems of quantification. He subverted objective measurement through the use of subjective units; he used clothes, hugs, and "spitting distance" to measure his environment—not just space but also institutions, relationships, and identity.
In his Pen Walking series (1994–2024), Shi exhausted pencils across paper, recording the passage of time through the gradual wearing down of each instrument. Each work embodies the life cycle of the used pencils and their remaining shavings. Shi used a pencil's life to symbolize the brevity and emptiness of samsaric life, while the series as a whole suggests endless cycles of death and rebirth.
Shi's Pencil Walker (1996–2015) stands as a monumental twenty-year exploration of existence and the limits of human endurance. Shi transformed the act of walking, drawing, and reciting into a personal ritual of repentance, embodying his inquiry into purpose, spirituality, and time. In subsequent works such as Ink Walking and Six-Syllable Mantra, Shi continued to merge physical endurance with spiritual practice, recasting simple acts—walking, chanting, marking—into meditations on mortality, impermanence, and reincarnation.
Shi's practice gained international recognition through exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Taipei Biennial, Art Basel Hong Kong, and Asia Now Paris, among others. His work resides in major collections including the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and the White Rabbit Collection in Sydney. Shi earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and has participated in residencies at MoMA PS1 and the Headlands Center for the Arts.
With his passing in 2024, many of Shi's lifelong works reached their intended conclusion. What remains is a coherent body of work that stands as one of the most sustained investigations of duration, spiritual inquiry, and the poetics of measurement in contemporary art.