Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Shi Jinsong: Waiting for a response which we might never get
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.
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
Ruben Natal-San Miguel is a New York based photogrpher published internationally.
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