REFLEXION is pleased to present “Pinecone,” a solo exhibition by artist SHI Xiang, opening on September 5, 2026. The exhibition marks the artist’s inaugural solo show at REFLEXION.
The pinecone is a silent thing of nature. It presents itself to us in a state of closure, its layered scales overlapping like armour. Once part of a tree’s living process—having grown, matured, and released its seeds—it becomes, after falling from the branch, a dried, lifeless object that nonetheless takes on a nearly mineral quality. It is hard, contracted, marked by time, yet between those scales, traces of its former life remain discernible. In short, the pinecone is a thing of contradictions, never fully opening itself to the viewer.
Perhaps it was precisely this contradictory nature that drew Shi Xiang in. From 2023 onward, he has worked exclusively on the theme of the pinecone, painting it continuously for three years without interruption. In the earliest canvases, the pinecone remains recognisable—the object is concrete, certain. But as the series advances, its original morphology begins to shift: contours soften, brushwork grows freer, and lines seem to break away from the shape itself.
Repetition is Shi Xiang’s creative habit. Yet within that repetition, the greatest difficulty he faces is constantly overcoming the inertia of habit—in order to rediscover the surprise that the object still holds. It feels like a struggle, a contest—a nearly ascetic effort to draw ever closer to the subject. Consequently, many of his previous painting habits are consciously abandoned, and the direction of the work becomes strikingly decisive. By the later stages, the image becomes almost illegible: large masses of dense black, rich with subtle traces, dominate the composition, and the layered “tower” structure even grows smooth. The form seems to spin—charged with speed and force—transforming into a more abstract, more immediate visual state. The object, it appears, has “vanished.”
But when the object fades, what remains? Perhaps it is a presence of “force” that shifts the painting away from the task of representation. This force is externalised as a material intensity beyond the image—particularly evident in the later works, where dense lines, accumulated graphite traces, and repeatedly rubbed paper surfaces grow more pronounced. Internally, this force reads more like a generative mechanism—an inner dynamic that continuously forms and deforms shapes, growing more pressing and more kinetic as the series advances. The power is released from within the natural object and transferred onto the paper. It connects natural experience with painterly experience, seeing with creating, transforming into a restless, perpetually proliferating life process on the surface. And it is in this process that a once-silent natural object—a pinecone—acquires a new language, continuously driving the artist onward into the unknown depths.
This text is an excerpt. The full version, please scan the QR code on the back
SHI Xiang, born in 1987 in Tieling, Liaoning Province, graduated from the Department of Fresco and Mixed Material Painting of Hubei Academy of Fine Arts as an undergraduate in 2010; graduated from the Fourth Studio of the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts with a Master’s Degree in 2016, and now lives and works in Beijing.
In his creations, he continues the previous Chinese artist’s thinking about still life, and maximally dissolves the color, replacing it with a renewed cognition of the object, and an understanding of the shape, volume, and even the essence of the object, using the most simple materials and methods to dig into the most easily overlooked aspects of everyday still life.
