Old Wall was created for an invitational Asian space art exhibition in 2003. Artists from Iran, India, China, Japan and some other Asian countries were invited to create soft sculptures representative of their cities. Shi Hui was among the solicited. She lives in Hangzhou and loves to take a stroll in its old neighborhoods where inspiration for the piece abounded in the old suburb courtyards. “Unlike in northern China, walls in Hangzhou are wet and mossy and often shrouded in morning fog. Such old walls are now disappearing,” said Shi Hui. After repeated experiments, she settled on rice paper and some other light materials to complete her work.

Compendium of Materia Medica is another example of Shi Hui’s fiber art. She used copious pulp and bamboo fibers to complete opened “books” that were spread out to occupy an area of two square meters in the exhibition hall. Plants and flowers, also made of fiber materials, stood in the foreground, and gradually faded into the pages, as if they were growing out of the books. Chinese materials were used to represent the Chinese medicine classic, and this surrealistic approach is her favorite and most effective tool of expression.

“It’s very important for artists to find materials that suit them,” said Shi Hui. She found rice paper suited her best after comparing Western paper, glass, fiber reinforced plastics, and some other modern materials. “Rice paper is natural, stretches well and is very Chinese. The material seems to have life and react to your touch; it even seems to have its own aspirations that affect how you work with it,” she commented.

An accomplished representative of the contemporary Chinese art scene, Shi Hui has been exhibited on invitation at the National Gallery in Berlin, Pompidou Center in Paris, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Genova Museum of Contemporary Art. Some of her works are in the collection of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.