Regarding 离岛 (Outlying Island) from Shiyu, the author seems to depict the relationship between an adult and their hometown, which once nurtured them, through "blurred" and "silent" imagery. The sense of isolation, much like an island, is a central theme of this series. This isolation, or rather alienation, reflects the generational disconnect felt by young people, stemming from their own negative emotional experiences. On the other hand, it also suggests that the hometown itself is slowly becoming an "island of memories." As the title "Departing Island" implies, the once-familiar hometown, along with the emotions connected to it, drifts away as one grows up.

Shiyu used Xuan paper and Chinese painting materials to create a domain with cultural heritage and historical background in the picture. Naked women, crowded patients with fluid transfusion, and the young with caps, these clear and real figures appear in the boyhood memories of every Chinese youth, and of course, inevitably pull closely the audience with the semblable memories into the domain created by Shiyu, beyond the current timeline and space, to experience the emotions and thoughts of the bigger picture.

The traditional elements of Chinese painting, such as the stroke method used by Shiyu to outline the figures and scatter perspective, remind people of the traditional Chinese royal palace paintings, and the unique brushstrokes also remind people of the Dunhuang murals that span the long river of time... This makes the regional and cultural attributes of this stack of works more intense, but at the same time, it takes the core of Western individualism as an issue: the confusion of teenagers and the spiritual detachment from the current secular society. The combination of spiritual core and expression technique of the work presents a lovely and strong narrative with humanistic color.

In my view, the most memorable part of this series is how it captures the essence of Eastern abstract art. The artist uses only two fundamental symbols — an island and a group of people — to convey a profound idea, something that cannot be fully expressed. The intangible, the unspoken, is conveyed through painting techniques that provoke deep reflection.

This makes the process of watching these works as intoxicating as slowly reading Ba Jin's poems...

”On the sea, in the mountains, in the gardens, in the streets. Sometimes, leaning alone on the high terrace of the city at night in serenity, I gazed at the glorious moon and always felt that chilling light and freezing vapor seeping into my body.”——— Moon, Ba Jin.