“I draw inspiration from inwards”, Cissy Ruoyao Shi told me over a Zoom interview from her studio in Toronto, during early May of this year. If you want to understand Shi, you need only examine her portfolio of work which weaves together a metamorphose coming-of-age story, rendered in oil and acrylic paint.
Cissy Ruaoyao Shi is a Toronto-based contemporary artist specializing in acrylic and oil paintings. After graduating from the visual arts program at Dawson College in Montreal, Shi moved to Toronto to study fine arts at OCAD University. Shi’s brushstrokes are doused in visceral ink, cataloging a chronology of her life story. Using a unique style of realistic surrealism, sex, dreams, love and loss, memory and mental health are thematically embossed across her compositions.
Shi grew up in HangZhou, the capital city of the Zhejiang province located southeastern in China. Her hometown, she describes as “a little big city,” the place where her roots as an artist took form as a young girl. “I’ve been drawing and sketching since I was two years old,” she explained. Shi’s early upbringing in Hangzhou remains a salient theme of her portfolio through color and memory. “I recreate the atmosphere of what I feel [...] Green and brown shades give off the nostalgic feel of my hometown,” she said.
Shi’s portfolio contains a confrontational honesty which spindles her story of personal growth through life experiences together. Love and memory inspire Shi’s work. A 2021 acrylic on canvas piece titled “White Night”, deconstructs the break-up of her first long-term relationship. “Personal memories influence my own work,” Shi explained, pointing to the large-scale portrait of herself and her ex-partner sitting on a couch at a party scene. The piece, which exhibits Shi’s technical finesse, tactfully captures “the bitter-sweet nostalgia of breaking up after three years of being together and a year of long-distance” she explained. Heartbreak and melancholia are captured in her palette of green and blue tones. “I use these [colors] for memory and peace” she disclosed. This painting reconciles the resolution of long-distance love which Shi explains “had a sense of peace that it was over, after so much time apart”.
At age fifteen, Shi left her family and immigrated alone by herself to Montreal, Canada. While enrolled at Dawson College, her interest in painting flourished. As a teenager, Shi began to harness color and multidisciplinary art as a medium of therapeutic expression and escape. Catharsis, found in painting, has been an important therapeutic apparatus through Shi’s personal mental health journey. “After high school, I went through a difficult time and therapy helped me understand how memory and human relationships affect people's growth [...] therapy helped me look inward," she divulged.
These expressive themes are at play in her most recent project, titled Clue. The project is Shi’s thesis for OCAD University, which conceptually lays out, “all the clues I gather for myself to grow out of trauma”. It's an arrangement of six oil paintings illustrating the figures of, what she describes as her “interior monologue”. Shi’s intrinsic silhouettes are positioned across eerie crimson and charcoal backdrops which have an unearthly setting. Clue, Shi explained, is an artistic attempt “to piece together the realities of self-growth, which is a story that is complicated and doesn't fit the traditional narrative”. Clue hashes out “the start of my mental health journey [..] where I am diverging trying to discover the root of everything,” she said.
In gothic surrealism, the compositions debunk the elements of her inner psyche. Each painting is a clue that pieces together a colossal life puzzle. Clue demonstrates “the reality of self-growth”, she said. Over zoom, Shi pointed her camera toward a portrait piece of two women grasping at each other's arms, one painted in an icy blue shade and the other in a red flesh tone. Their expressions pierce through the canvas and confront the viewer directly. Shi explained that these women represent her two alter egos; inner positivity and inner critique, who are in a constant cerebral battle. On the canvas, Shi’s egos lurch towards each other. In the corridors of her brain, these figures “are fighting each other every day”.
The cataclysmic characters of Shi’s psyche are rectified over a dimly lit Kafkaesque dining table tableau. Shi has seated the figures side by side in a large-scale oil on canvas painting. “These dark figures represent bad influencing feelings and trauma in my past [...] they symbolize my inner monologue of alter egos,” she said. The lurid atmosphere of this composition constructs a space where all her traumas are confronted and acknowledged.
These pieces explore Shi’s childhood, negotiating her complex relationship with her parents. “They loved me in a wrong way [...] because I didn't feel intimate with my parents. I'm constantly seeking that intimacy somewhere else,” she said. Her turbulent relationship with her mother is relayed on the canvas as the shadowed figure standing in the corner frame. This table vignette illustrates, "all the clues I gather for myself to grow out of trauma”, she said. Confronting the childhood anxiety “that you'll never get what you want” was a deeply personal abrasion Shi purged while compiling the thematic approach to her thesis project.
Toward the end of our interview, Shi turned to a small detailed painting of M. Scott Peck’s book titled “The Road Less Traveled”. This book, she explained, is the conceptual grounding piece of Clue and contains a hint which can be found in the other paintings of the project. “I read this book when I was 18 and I read it over when I need guidance,” she said. For Shi, “The Road Less Traveled” is an important literary reminder that personal trauma is surmountable. “There are shadows that are always standing there influencing your decisions in life that you can never get rid of, but if you learn to understand their presence it's okay”, she said.
Through an examination of personal growth, Shi’s work can resonate among a broad demographic of viewers. Barely two years out of the COVID-19 pandemic, battling mental health and addressing anxiety and depression has become an omnipresent discussion in contemporary youth culture. By diving inside her own psyche, Shi’s paintings successfully begin to unravel the labyrinth of vulnerability, trepidation, and turbulence that are integral components of understanding oneself.
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