Shi Jinsong: Waiting for a response which we might never get at SCAD Museum of Art

Shi Jinsong, Bamboo Installation.

 

Shi Jinsong: Waiting for a response which we might never get

SCAD Museum of Art

September 21, 2022 through January 2, 2023 

By Ruben Natal-San Miguel, October 2022 

Shi Jinsong’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S., Waiting for a response which we might never get is a meditation on the human need for speed. Materializing the impact of rapid urbanization on traditional Chinese landscapes, Shi Jinsong transforms the gallery into an immersive indoor sculpture garden in which the artist’s “tree-motorbikes” idle amid mechanical bamboo.

Shi Jinsong, "Let's Go," 2013, motorcycle, industrial waste, and resin, 106 x 39 x 63 in. Courtesy of the artist and Eli Klein Gallery, New York.
 

In these signature works, Shi Jinsong mutates the anatomy of machines and natural forms to create new variants, connecting ideas of growth and decay of the environment with production and waste of capitalistic society. The artist’s über-stylized bamboo sculptures hybridize the archaic and the futuristic, the analog and the digital, to express the simultaneously accelerating speeds of technological and artistic productivity across millennia.

As society continues to produce, consume, communicate, and compete at a blistering pace, Shi Jinsong urges us to look back at what fuels us and to contemplate the future that awaits us if we stay in the race. WM