The Toy Packaging series marks the latest development in Shih Yung Chun’s practice, revealing a highly controlled and labor-intensive creative process. Each scene is constructed in his studio using his own ceramic sculptures as props, which are then meticulously packaged to resemble commercial toy products. These staged environments function as the point of origin for multiple outcomes—painting, video, and sculptural works—allowing a single object to circulate across different media. Works such as Obstacle Training appear in several forms, generating a fictional ecosystem that reanimates static historical imagery into surreal and theatrical visual narratives.

This approach positions Shih not only as an artist, but as the director of a self-contained cinematic universe. During a period of physical immobility caused by a leg injury between 2018 and 2019, he turned to writing a novel rooted in the rhythms of his everyday life. Much like his visual practice, the text collapses the boundaries between fact and fiction, constructing a space where lived experience and imagination coexist. This narrative impulse continues to inform his work, where reality is consistently re-scripted through surreal intervention.

Rather than relying on extraordinary subjects, Shih draws heavily from the mundane objects and events that populate his daily surroundings. Through processes of displacement and recontextualization, the familiar is rendered strange, and the ordinary becomes charged with narrative tension. These transformations destabilize the viewer’s perception of reality, inviting them to reconsider how meaning is constructed and how imagination might emerge from the most unassuming elements of everyday life.

9 November – 12 November 2023
West Bund Art Center & Shanghai Exhibition Center
YIRI ARTS