The Gesture of Being : ALIEN Art Centre

How does being leave a trace?

At a time when words, images, and information can be generated and reproduced almost instantly, The Gesture of Being returns to a more fundamental question: what cannot be replaced? Centered on the artist's body, time, and sustained labor, the exhibition considers how repeated actions become enduring traces of lived experience.

For this exhibition, Shi Jin-Hua presents two works from his Pen Walking series alongside his seminal performance project, Pencil Walker.

The Pen Walking series originated from an ordinary moment during the artist's years studying in the United States. While writing in his journal, Shi noticed that a pencil he had used for many years was nearing the end of its life. He took a blank sheet of paper and repeatedly traced irregular lines until the pencil was completely exhausted, then adhered the pencil shavings to the paper's surface. This simple act became the foundation of the series, establishing its central premise: to unfold the complete life of a single pencil across a single plane. The intersecting, meandering, and cyclical lines become a metaphor for the course of a life, while the artist accompanies the pencil to its final moment.

In Pencil Walker, this meditation expands from the pencil to the body itself. Holding a pencil, Shi repeatedly walked back and forth along a wall, drawing lines through the movement of his body. Every performance followed strict rules: each took place within a forty-centimeter-wide section of the wall and lasted exactly two hours and fifteen minutes. While walking, he chanted Buddhist scriptures and periodically sharpened the pencil with a sharpener attached to his arm. Over the course of twenty years, he completed sixty performances—a number that corresponds to the sixty-year cycle of the traditional Chinese sexagenary calendar.

For Shi Jin-Hua, walking is a form of writing. The body becomes a tool, and repeated physical labor becomes a way of reflecting upon life itself. The dense accumulation of graphite marks across the wall records not only physical endurance and discipline, but also the artist's sustained inquiry into existence, time, and mortality. Walking becomes a form of spiritual practice, while writing becomes evidence of being. What ultimately remains are the traces of attentive presence within each passing moment.

Shi also places great importance on documentation. Throughout his conceptual and performance practice, he carefully preserves photographs, texts, and archival records that reveal the process and ideas behind each work. These documents are not merely supplementary materials; they are essential witnesses to actions that once occurred and thoughts that once took form.

Bringing together works by Shi Jin-Hua, Yeesookyung, En-Man Chang, Yeh Wei-Li, and Charwei Tsai, The Gesture of Being explores identity, memory, impermanence, and forms of lived experience that resist acceleration, replication, and replacement through walking, repair, embroidery, photography, site-based practice, and writing.