Ritualized languages were put in a prominent position in SHI Qing’s works before 2004, which share a relation with drama. This is the dominant note of SHI's previous works. He tends to build an atmosphere to synthesize art mediums and utilize symbolic languages to ritualize our behaviors in daily life. Those physical behaviors and patterns of behaviors happening repeatedly and accidentally in daily life always attract SHI Qing to observe and inspect them consciously. Symbolic behaviors which are abstracted from daily life have become mainline in SHI's works, for example, changing white sheets in "Wander Off", making dinner in video work "Drowning" (co-wok with Zhang Hui), and combing hairs in "No Lutos In Winter". Other similar actions like throwing flowers or ice cubes and buring something are turning into self-talk dropping out of daily life.

Since SHI Qing's first exhibition in 1999, which was born in 1969, SHI has made more than forty works now, including live shows, installations, videos, photographs and multimedia. We can see three phases of SHI’s works: "black Taboo" based on psychology takes experiments on the body and environment during "adolescence"; "Expired Prophecy" inspects into collectivism by studying myths and current "Individual Cities" which researches on urban cities differs from the reason in sociology and the experiences of body and mind from a microcosmic view in macro level. Based on his own system which is not inheritable and duplicable, SHI searches for his own "escape line" to complete individual modes of speaking concealed among noises. Another method acquired by SHI is "historical imagination" that when main histories are excluded, events in the past are fermented again by individual's subjective awareness, which means that the soul of "histories" have been shown out by artists. The new experiments from this phase will be shown in SHI Qing's solo exhibition in May in Shanghai.