This display presents letters and poetic materials by Stone Chun Shi from 1987 to 1993, documenting a phase in which artistic expression was carried out through writing prior to the formation of a visual language. Stone’s poetry was formally published as a poetry collection and belongs to a pre-visual stage: a moment when image had not yet unfolded, yet artistic structure had already been established through language.

Selected Early Letters (1987–1993)

Timeless consciousness was not a theory named later, but a way of living and practicing that had already begun in Stone’s youth—one that had yet to be recognized by the world.

In 1987, shortly after arriving in New York, Stone repeatedly wrote about loneliness and creation in his letters. For him, loneliness was not a personal predicament but a shared condition of modern life; only creation, he believed, would faithfully accompany a person throughout a lifetime, while nothing else need be sought. He early perceived contemporary art as moving toward the “mechanization of the human,” and astutely identified the era as one with “no best, no center”—a time in which outcomes were perpetually deferred.

That same year, he began placing poetry alongside painting, discovering that both employed the same inner method for expressing thought. Art, in his view, did not serve a social function; like poetry, it belonged solely to the creator. Confronted with the entertainment-driven reality of the New York art scene, he became even more convinced that art was entering a period of uncertainty, and that its true momentum might come from those still unrecognized—those who retained naivety and residual warmth.

After receiving a scholarship in 1988, which he described as a “stairway toward the world,” he did not alter his fundamental attitude toward art. In the years that followed, he continued to create works addressing themes of sex, death, love, and AIDS—not as social commentary, but as unavoidable experiences of the body and of existence. Between 1991 and 1992, his exhibitions in New York drew a limited response, yet his work was selected by aGerman gallery, leading to multiple exhibitions. Of this, he wrote in a letter: “Whatever the outcome, I don’t mind. Art objects are so insignificant.”

In 1993, while traveling between New York and Taipei, he exchanged commercial projects for creative space, while his work entered exhibition context sat the Museum of Kassel in Germany. These letters make it clear that long before timeless consciousness was named, Stone had already been living within a creative state unconcerned with results, reputation, or stages of success. Here, time is not a process but a suspended backdrop; creation itself is the only true present.

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