Art Market Magazine: Thank you, Chun Shi, for this interview!
We will soon speak about your unique artistic style and technique, but first, let's talk about your background. Your passion for art started at a young age; tell us how you became interested in the art field. Did you come from an artistic family?
“I started painting when I was 10 years old. My mother found a private art teacher to teach me. He told my mother that I had a special talent with colors so from time to time he would bring me oil colors that we couldn’t afford for me to paint with. Years later, I found out that my mother’s ancestor was Su Dongpo, a famous poet, calligraphist, and painter from the Song Dynasty.”
It was purely accidental that Stone stumbled on the journey of art. In his childhood, he was a naughty boy and a troublemaker. When a neighbor started to teach Stone the basics of drawing, no one expected him to be interested in the practice and be able to sit and sketch for hours. Overjoyed, his mother immediately purchased some painting tools and paint with her meager wages in the hope that it would help Stone to stop stirring up trouble. Very soon he was good enough to choose a master as his mentor. After becoming the pupil of designer Zhang Xin, Stone’s painting progressed by leaps and bounds. He also greatly benefited by the tutoring of the art master He Ye. A few years later, he took part in the Chinese national college entrance examination and ranked first place in the arts, which landed him on the candidate lists of art institutes of higher education such as Zhejiang Provincial Academy of Arts and Suzhou Institute of Technology.
In 1987, Stone immigrated to New York and continued to chase his artistic dreams. At that time, he fell in love with New York's East Village art scene. In New York, Stone was highly influenced by American contemporary art and rock music. He listened to heavy metal rock music, taught himself to play electric guitar, and wore long hair and military boots. He started to try woodblock burning and carving as well as various other mixed media.
In 1993, Stone was discovered by the famous Taiwanese film director Wang Choi Xiang and was invited to join the New New Generation commercial series advertising Wulong tea. He served as the spokesman of the so-called New New Generation in Taiwan and played the role of a New York street artist. The commercial was broadcast in the New Year of 1994 and became a hit, making Stone the front-page star of the entertainment industry in Taiwan overnight.
Not long after becoming famous in Taiwan, Stone was invited to serve as the VJ at MTV Asia in order to improve ratings in China. That year a comeback of MTV to Asia was widely reported in all major US media outlets. However, after serving as the number one VJ of MTV Asia for less than a year, Stone became tired of his job. He longed to return to the art world. However, one year later, when he finally resigned and returned to New York, Stone worked in creative production for a television production company. During the next ten years, he continued to build the company.
Looking back at these years, crossing from art to entertainment and media and then to business, he seems to treat his projects like performance art, constantly changing and innovating. If he had not been doing business all these years, he probably would not be able to have such a thorough understanding of life, and probably would not have been able to discover and create his own visual language, the Oil Cube, in 2010.
A. M.: Tell us about your "Oil Cube" painting technique; where did your method come from and where do you get your inspiration?
“The technique I use is like Chinese calligraphy, where each cube is like a written character. It’s been more than 40 years since China opened its doors in 1979. Great changes have taken place along with many social problems. In 2010, I felt that a lot of things are hidden behind the ambiguity of pixels, thus, I started to use pixelated oil cubes to express this hidden world. These oil cubes are pretty to look at, just as many things in the world, good or bad, are hidden behind the beauty”.
Stone discovered the “Oil Cube” painting technique when a Shanghai businessman asked him to paint an oil painting and offered to pay him five thousand yuan RMB without even seeing his work beforehand. Although Shi Cun had not been painting for years, his last painting was sold for more than ten thousand dollars. He felt to price lower than that was insulting.
It suddenly dawned upon Stone: ‘Since it's just about money, why don't I just paint him an RMB bill?’. He recalled the hardships he had gone through in doing business without much success. He saw money-worshiping society as controlling art and even people's lives. He decided to use sarcasm in his Renminbi creation through a pixelated style and named this style "Oil Cube", cutting the Renminbi bill into a tiny pixel grid and then filling each pixel with oil paint to form a complete Yuan.
The creation of the mosaic RMB series inspired Stone to delve back into his art practice. It took him three years to finish the RMB series comprising of six oil paintings. The result was stunning, and Stone was even featured in a TV series titled RMB. Individual pieces of this series have been exhibited in Beijing Songzhuang Art Museum, the 2012 Art Exhibition of China, as well as in a solo exhibition titled "Gong Xi Fa Cai" at a gallery in Chelsea, New York City.
A. M.: Most artists wouldn’t have the patience for creating such large-scale artwork filled with small colored cubes. Where does your patience come from, and how long does it take to finish a painting?
“A 10,000 oil cube painting normally takes about three months to complete, 8-10 hours a day. The process is like meditation for me, which calms me down. I’m usually an impatient person, but I see the oil cube method as a journey to heal my impatience in life”.
Stone’s patience also comes from his childhood training in painting and calligraphy. As he was growing up in China during the cultural revolution, he had no books to read except for ancient poems of the Tang and Song Dynasties. He was inspired by the effect of the words in each poem and started to learn how to write poems and calligraphy. After he came to the States, he continued his writing and painting. He published his poems in literary magazines and became a contemporary artist, exhibiting in top contemporary galleries including Alternative Museum, the Clock Tower, White Colum in New York, Grimm-Museum in Germany, as well as Up Gallery and IT Park gallery in Taiwan.
A. M.: Can you describe your workflow and the process of creating an artwork from the idea to the finished piece?
“Whenever I finish a painting, I feel liberated. I start to enjoy my daily life. After a period of time, I feel bored again. I start to long for my mediation method. Then, I begin to think about what I’m going to paint next and get the imagination going. I will stay away from people and things I like to do until my heart feels calm. Then, I will have the answer for the next painting. I start to clean my studio, make the frame, prepare materials, etc. At one odd and unexpected moment, I’ll start painting my first cube. From the first brushstroke, I find my way back to my meditation. I begin to stay in a state of retreat until I complete the whole painting”.
To Stone, the creation of an oil cube artwork is not as easy as doing regular oil paintings. Each oil cube painting is composed of almost twenty thousand cubes and each cube is a different color. He fine tunes each color stoke by stroke, and it takes him a few months to finish a painting, spending five to twelve hours a day painting cubes. Stone isolates his mind and physically distances himself from the world in order to complete his work. He constantly relies on his will power and concentration throughout the whole painting process, and he sees the whole process as a form of meditation.
A. M.: The final outcome is very impressive; for example, THE LIGHT-PINK artwork, a glowing cross based on a gradient of colors, the smooth and dynamic changes between the colors are outstanding. Do you use an app to create a sketch before painting?
“In today’s chaotic world, as an artist who needs to complete a perfect painting, you need to borrow all methods to present the image in your mind. I am no exception”.
Rather than focusing on how he does his work, Stone wants people to understand why he chose oil cubes as his visual language. In his early works, he explored contemporary art through mixed medium oil paintings. However, with the oil cube style, he wanted to discover a unique path that is totally different from what he did previously. He developed this style not only because it makes his paintings difficult to create, but also because it expresses his statement that craftsmanship is the backbone of traditional oil painting and should not be diminished by the new digital art wave.
A. M.: Why celebrities? Is there a deeper meaning behind painting these known figures, or is it mainly visual for you?
“I only paint those celebrities whom I respect. The glory of their personality and humanity appeal to me.”
Stone’s first series of portraits began with Marilyn Monroe, originally one of Andy Warhol’s pop art icons. He wanted to bring Andy Warhol’s pop art back to traditional art with this painting. This was the start of Stone’s celebrity series, which went on to include many musicians who touched his heart, including Miles Davis, whose improvisational music has always been one of Stone’s favorites. As a musician himself, Stone related to Miles Davis’s music, especially the way he explored new musical territory. Stone respects artists like Miles Davis who alway push their own limits to bring the best out of their work.
A. M.: Another awe-inspiring work is the $1 ONE BUCK artwork. Tell us about the philosophy and meaning behind this piece.
“One Buck is the foundation of American society. From the founding fathers and the conspiracy Illuminati to the failing economy, it reflects this.”
After the completion of the RMB series, Shi Cun began to focus on the “currency war”. He used the oil cube approach to present the two main currencies of the world, the RMB and the US dollar, demonstrating the hidden Sino-US currency war taking place.
From 2010 onward, Stone spent five years painting nine pieces of oil cube currency. His most recent currency painting was the front side of the US one-dollar bill, which took him half a year to complete.
After the completion of this painting, Stone was invited to exhibit it in the Un(Scene) Contemporary Art Exhibition. During the exhibition, many people were attracted by this bill artwork and had their pictures taken in front of it. This inspired Stone and he started planning a painting of the backside of the US one-dollar bill. He hand-made a wood frame and installed the two sides of the one-dollar artwork together, creating a three-dimensional one-dollar oil painting.
Stone believes that New York is the best art museum without walls. He bought a trailer, modified it, and installed the three-dimensional dollar on it, turning it into a mobile art gallery that toured on the streets of New York.
Wherever Stone’s "One Buck" went, a crowd surrounded it. Just as Stone told a Chinese reporter: "Since ONE BUCK went out on the streets, I am not able to tell its future, and nor am I able to tell my own future. Maybe we really do not know the future of our lives, therefore we are just living, we are going, not knowing whether forward or backward, upward or downward, we are just on the road, on the road of New York, on the road of life, on the road destined by our fate. However, only in the best street museum of New York can art break through the form and the walls to exist freely, to be appreciated by all. This is the aim of my painting and also the ultimate goal of the art I am pursuing.”
Stone’s One Buck was featured in many Chinese newspapers, magazines, and blogs including China Central Television Network, China Press, and Sino-American TV Network.
A. M.: You have exhibited in many galleries and museums worldwide, including in Taiwan, Beijing, China, NYC, and Germany, among others. What were the most common reactions towards your work at these exhibitions?
“The reaction I heard most is ‘wow’! People often ask me what kind of material I use for the painting. When I tell them that they are oil on canvas paintings, they start to ‘wow’.”
Stone’s large-scale oil cube paintings are always the center of attention at events. Most people cannot believe that the cubes on the paintings are made of oil paint and are hand painted. One curator said during an interview that the amount of oil paint Stone’s paintings use shocked him.
A. M.: Your art is highly sought after by private collectors. Do you also participate in auctions?
Stone participated in the 2018 Poly Auction in Beijing where his artwork “Buddha Lotus” (42’x29”) was sold for $125,000. The Polly Auction put Stone on the map and since then, his artworks have been collected via private collectors from both China and America. Stone sees his success as a token of appreciation for his visual language and art. Being appreciated and supported for his innovation motivates him to keep painting.
A. M.: What does the future hold? Have you scheduled any future exhibitions or art fairs?
“I will continue to uphold the value and craftsmanship of traditional oil painting. I’ve started a nonprofit foundation with a few partners, hoping to support those who have dedicated themselves to the innovative creation of their own visual language”.
In today’s world where crypto art and NFTs are taking over more traditional artforms, Stone feels more responsibility to continue creating traditional oil paintings one cube at a time. He has started a nonprofit foundation with a few partners in order to support artists like him who see craftsmanship in art as a priority.
