ARTIST

Mr. Frank Shih received his education from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and from Princeton University (M.Arch.). During his practice as a licensed architect in U.S., his work had received a Progressive Architecture Design Award and shared a National Endowment of the Art Grant for Urban Planning. Representing developers, he had managed iconic projects designed by KPF, Thomas Heatherwick, Foster Partners and Shigeru Ban. His involvement with artists in prestigious real estate development projects provided insight for him to create his own artwork.

​Working as an artist with immense knowledge in Art and Architectural History, and with experience in design and construction, he is interested in the making of the illusive and the metaphysic of space in his sculptures. His early aesthetic thinking was greatly influenced by Classical order and Romanticism, while his present work is driven by the abstraction of the non-figurative world, taking esthetics and applications from technology, and borrowing the strength of nature as well as the human form. The tension in the representation of hisconstructive components is balanced by the introduction of new manner and form creating a surrealistic realm leading to new horizon.

Mr. Frank Shih is committed to the discovery of “form”, re-defining its relationship with the materialistic world and nature. His conceptual thinking of “Reversed Shadow” and “Reversed Gravity” attributed to his latest work from 2013 to 2017. Mr. Frank Shih lives and works in New York and Shanghai.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Form should not be only seen as platonic substance or elements of plasticity. Form is to give form, is to change form in indefinite possibilities and meanings; so are emotion and dream, one creates the existence of other. It is an imitation of life. In certain aspect, it reflects nature and its force. Invention in science and technology made by man is to prove its usefulness in the world. Art is to glorify nature and amplify humanity, beyond functional purpose. Steel and bronze are my primary materials to create my universe. Wood and new modernistic materials are supplementary components. In the process of creation, the intellectual process and the intuition met. The moment of collapse of an idea and form is the birth of another idea and form. The changes at the moment are to be captured. The frozen moment in action becomes the testimony of event in space and time. The puzzle, the unpredictability of mind, and the human emotion verse the greatness of nature are expression of my art.
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In creation of sculpture, I search for ideal and non-ideal form, form with symbolic meaning and form with arbitrary geometry. Thinking, referencing and de-referencing from the past, de-coding and interpreting with new human ideas and technology, and working with unintended moves or mistakes to be free to becoming an art form in my creation. It sets complex readings and gives illusiveness echoing different emotion from viewers. My curiosity in the force of nature and human movement is also magnified in my sculpture and installation, regarded as inspiration and the source of techniques. It is not the method used to conceive work, but the unintended messages in the creative process which prescribed certain truth of the world. It is the romance in channeling abstraction and representational, merging futuristic and traditional, non-purposeful and un-obvious, adventurous and ascetic, they became the formation of my art work. My work intends to capture memory, render sensuousness, courage and strength.