Timur Si-Qin’s interests in the evolution of culture, the dynamics of cognition, and contemporary philosophy, weave together to create a new kind of environmental art. Taking form through diverse media, installations of 3D printed sculptures, light-boxes, websites, texts, and virtual reality, Si-Qin’s work often challenges common notions of the organic vs the synthetic, the natural vs the cultural, the human vs non-human, and other dualisms at the heart of western consciousness.

Si-Qin’s long term meta-project is the proposal of a new secular faith in the face of climate change, global pandemics, and biodiversity collapse, called New Peace. Through New Peace individual works aggregate into a hyper-distributed, branded ecosystem of signifiers. Drawing from disparate disciplines like the anthropology of religion, marketing psychology, and new materialist philosophy, Si-Qin regards spiritualities as cultural softwares capable of deep behavioral and political intervention. New Peace is thus a new protocol for the necessary renegotiation of our conceptual and spiritual relationship with the non-human. New Peace is an artwork, a church, a brand, and a memetic machine.

Si-Qin is a New York-based artist of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent who grew up in Berlin, Beijing, and in the American Southwest. Recent exhibitions include the first Diriyah Biennial, Riyadh, Von Ammon Co., Washington D.C., Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art 2, the 2019 Asian Art Biennale, the 5th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art, UCCA, Beideihe, Spazio Maiocchi, Milan, The Highline, NY, and Magician Space, Beijing.

Titled Ecotone Dawn, Timur Si-Qin (b.*1984, lives and works in New York) refers to the so-called “ecotone”, which in ecology refers to the transitional zone between two different ecosystems or biotope types; typical ecotones include forest edges or shoreline zones. The nature of the actual separation or boundary can take various forms; permeability and interaction are variable, but ecotones as a whole are characterized by increased biological diversity. As hinges for interaction between bio-diverse areas, ecotones are also bridges for the affects of climate change. In the brightly lit main hall, Timur Si-Qin freezes a desert sunset in four wide-format light boxes (Sharaan Sunbreak, 2023). The images are a rendered panorama using original footage from the Saudi Arabian oasis of Al-Ula. In the centre of the space, Etching the Path to the Sea Within (2023) features a 3D-printed tree trunk that was found and photographed along a pilgrimage route in Thailand. Various messages carved into the bark by passers-by are preserved by the artist, as are the support structures necessary for stability in the making of a 3D print. Instead of removing and smoothing their evidence away, Si-Qin keeps them as part of the sculpture. The fusion of root extensions and technical support structures creates a cyborg-like hybrid, referring both to the artist’s own production and that of the natural world. The mystical atmosphere that pervades the bright main hall extends into the darkened smaller halls of the galleries. Four photographic prints from the series Natural Origin (2023) depict what appear to be a particularly dense and lush forest, but in truth, the pictures  are shots from virtual cameras in a 3D rendering modelled by the artist. Derived from the flora and fauna of Upstate New York, the rendering is both a visually pleasurable composition of digitized nature, and a simulation of an entire ecosystem. The complexity leading to the bucolic image motifs is further enhanced by the projection of moving leaf shadows over the four images.

The exhibition is supported by: Société, Berlin, Magician Space, Beijing.

Société is pleased to announce Natural Origin, Timur Si-Qin’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Natural Origin continues the artists ongoing endeavor to think beyond the anthropocentric dualities underlying a contemporary culture “that approaches organisms only in terms of value and doesn’t recognize them as actual living and related creatures.”* In his book How Forests Think, the Canadian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn describes how a moment of intense anxiety separated him from his companions, and even himself, after encountering a dangerous situation on a remote South American highway. This moment of estrangement was allayed when he viewed a colorful tanager bird, which instantly dissolved his lingering anxiety by resituating him in a larger world beyond the symbolic—and beyond the human.

Reflecting Si-Qin’s abiding interest in notions of deep time, ecology, and evolution, the works in Natural Origin aim to elicit the feeling of shifting out of the symbolic and into the realm of direct experience. He transforms the gallery’s exhibition spaces into an immersive, darkened sanctuary that gradually enfolds the viewer with slow, immersive projections that cast shadows over his artworks. The experience of shadows imparts an alternative sense of space and dimensionality, blending physical experience with ocular patterns and mental images. Si-Qin likens the experience of shadows to how he visualizes the places that he’s been and how their memories interact with one another: how one environment, like a jungle in Puerto Vallarta, connects to another like the yellow birch forests of the Lake Champlain region, casting and connecting their shapes and outlines on one another, weightlessly and multidimensionally.

Most of the works in Natural Origin are created from the simulation of the Temperate Deciduous Forest eco-region of Upstate New York and Vermont. While having supported our species for over 50 thousand years, Temperate Deciduous Forests evolved over the past 30 million years and are some of the oldest biocommunities living in the world. Their increasing vulnerability to the climate crisis make temperate forests symbolic of the challenges and metamorphoses undergone by the living world. The wall works derive from renderings of a digital ecosystem that Si-Qin has created, a virtual world that digitally recreates specific places in the Adirondacks and the Lake Champlain region and their specific species of plants and rocks. For the artist, the interest lies not in notions of the uncanny, artificial life, or the digitization of nature, but rather understands it as a devotional and meditative endeavor, a method by which one is compelled to see into the richness of nature at ever greater depths. “Life on this planet stands at the cusp of a great threshold,” Si-Qin writes in his manifesto A New Protocol, “As we awaken for the first time to the full scale of the territory of space and time—something any living thing has only known for a century—we awaken also to our own capacities for altering our planet and ourselves.” Si-Qin’s exhibition at Société seeks to articulate alternative conceptual and visual frameworks to foster a reengineering of our relationship with the planet, enabling us, as Kohn writes, to “snap back into the world of life.”

A sensitive diagnosis requires us to turn our attention back to the fundamental relationship Westerners have, or rather do not have, with the natural world. As Indigenous scholar Frederick Martin puts it, “Europeans are the only people on the face of the earth who hate nature enough to advocate its total destruction. Native Americans don’t do that.” In classical Western cognition, nature is regarded as a limitless set of objects to be used for our own benefit in perpetuity. The anthropologist Wade Davis writes that “as a Canadian, [he was] brought up to think of a mountain as a pile of rocks, whereas to an Indigineous person, a mountain is a sacred deity.” These two acculturations produce vastly different results. Westerners have awoken to their own moderate scale of environmentalism only in the last few decades, and this trend must accelerate in order for us to have any hope of facing the challenges of climate change and biodiversity collapse. Although Indigenous Peoples make up only 5% of the global population, they manage more than one quarter of all land on the planet while protecting about 80% of global biodiversity. Western science is just catching up to some of the knowledge of Indigenous people when it comes to the complexity of ecological dynamics or the benefits of psychedelic medicine. The Western dismissal of nature runs deep. Core European cultural metaphors depict nature as an enemy to be overcome, a machine to be manipulated, and as property given to man by God to be held in dominion. The narratives of Western culture in movies, in books, and in art are almost always set on the stage of the human, with nature playing only supporting, minor or adversarial roles, if it is present at all. Many of the Western world’s intellectual giants were and are products of this Western mode of cognition. Freud argued that the progress of civilization required “taking up the attack on nature, thus forcing it to obey human will, under the guidance of science”. Even Marx and Engels were products of a Christo-European cognition that understood nature as something to be conquered and gotten under control, and thought of Indigenous religious beliefs about nature as “childlike.”

In the Oracle of the Ashes of Plants, Si Qin explores the relationship that humans have with nature throughout the Millenia. After visiting an archeological site in the mountains of Romania, he came across limestone dwellings that date back to the Neolithic era. One temple sat atop a steep hill in a beech forest, cut into a stone cliff, the landscape had been modified by diverse cultures and settlements marking thousands of years of use and adaptation. At the entrance was the stump of an enormous ancient spruce tree, to the artist it felt almost theatrically staged, symbolic of the state of the natural world in 2020. Oracle of the Ashes of Plants is the 3D-scanned remains of this tree. The stump is augmented, supported by a generated structure as well as sections of smooth geometric artificing and interpolation. The tree is orbited by a curved LED video that depicts its original environment. The work explores the anthropocentric mindset that characterizes humanity's domination of the natural world.

Washington DC: von ammon co is pleased to announce its next solo show, ​Take Me, I Love You, ​by New York based German artist Timur Si-Qin. This full-scale show will be the first of its kind in the United States, and will feature eleven new works by the artist, a combination of 3d printed sculptures, computer-generated landscapes and branded graphics from the artist’s meta project: New Peace. Concurrent with the exhibition, Si-Qin will release parts 1 and 2 of his new essay titled ​Heaven is Sick.

New Peace is a proposal for a new form of spirituality in the face of global pandemics, climate change, and biodiversity collapse. The legacy of agricultural religions of the West have led the world to an ecological precipice. The farming eschatology, particularly, of Christianity have promoted an extractive attitude towards nature. Westerners are raised to regard Nature as a soul-less and limitless resource for humans, to use and to hold in dominion—as given by God.

On the other hand the global Indigenous worldview has always recognized Nature as inherently alive, intelligent, symbiotic, and sacred. As the ecological consequences of climate change intensify, it is the global Indigenous worldview, rather than the Western one, that is being revealed to have been the more rational one all along. Spirituality and religion are some of the most powerful forces shaping human culture and behavior. New Peace is an artwork in the form of a campaign to articulate a spirituality of symbiosis for the 21st century.

New Peace comprises four modules or ideas. These concepts are possible sources for basing a contemporary spirituality today. The iconography of each source is represented in acrylic and 3d printed sculptures in the exhibition. The Undivided Ground​ is the idea that all are one, also known as the concept of immanence. Faith in Pattern​ is the idea that faith can be derived from the patterning of matter and reality itself. Pray to Scale​ is the idea that the scale and age of the universe itself is the higher power that we can connect with. Purpose from Difference​ is the idea that matter exists to experience every version of itself. The meaning of the universe is diversity itself.

Take Me, I Love You​ is both the attitude of causal, material, nature herself as well as a prayer to her. While nature has been a selfless mother to humanity and will continue to give of herself, this declaration must be reciprocated by humankind.

The proposition that stone “is alive” results in several ancillary questions – is humankind the measure of the universe? Is it shortsighted to base values solely on human needs, universalizing our limited ways of understanding the world? As urbanization and modernization progress, will such nearsighted forms of knowledge bring about a corresponding rise in alienation? After all, only humans can consume, produce, and create surplus value in the world of capital; in this game, “nature” can serve only as dead material. Timur Si-Qin and Su-Mei Tsestrive to imagine models and rubrics that are separate from “nature itself.” Si-Qin’s Juniper, produced in 2019, is a kind of billboard for the Anthropocene, advertising the spatial and temporal concepts attendant to this new epoch.

In Juniper, Si-Qin uses 3D printing technology to recreate the juniper tree that grew near Georgia O’Keeffe’s residence in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. In this work, viewers can see a riotous growth of various local fauna. The work also foregrounds the concept of New Peace: a new relationship between humans and nature that draws its formal appeal from the language of advertisements. Encountering this piece, viewers are reminded of creation myths that do not accord with science, in which a life is conceived from, nourished by, and born of innate matter.

Magician Space is proud to present a second solo exhibition for artist Timur Si-Qin. In this show, New York-based German artist Timur Si-Qin continues his development of New Peace, a secular spirituality for the 21st century. Identifying the dualistic legacy of agricultural society and religions as maladaptive for our contemporary world, New Peace argues for a re-enchantment with matter as the necessary basis for confronting the material problems of our times. The title East, South, West, North is a reference to the sacred circle of the four directions, a primary spiritual concept in pre-agrarian/hunter gatherer religions of Central Asia and Americas. With this Si-Qin signals both a return to and necessary upgrade of our spiritual orientation and dimensionality. In the white paper for New Peace entitled A New Protocol, the artist points out that religions are themselves technologies of belief. Protocols for human behavior towards one another and their environments. However, today the spiritual vs material dualism inherent to agricultural society and religion has become a maladaptive constraint that prevents us from adequately conceptualizing our connection to, and impact on, the non-human world. The response is a new secular spirituality of matter and an elucidation of a non-human ethics of difference. Influenced by currents of New Materialist philosophy that challenge the anthropocentric privileging of the human subject since the beginning of his practice, Si-Qin seeks a spiritual and intellectual reconceptualization in which the material is recognized for its inherent dynamism and creative potentiality. A plane of immanence on which animals, plants and other organisms are recognized as being connected to and on equal ontological footing with the human, in many ways resembling the pre-agrarian cosmologies. In this “radical immanence”, when the interconnected oneness of reality is recognized, the fractal patterning, movement, and infinite creativity of matter are elevated to the sacred. Within “infinite difference”, the ceaseless variation and differentiation of matter attests to an irreducible and open ended universe. New Peace is Si-Qin’s attempt to provide a potential path and personal resources for humanity to re-orient itself in an age of cataclysmic change.

The cultural roots of Timur Si-Qin stretch far and wide. The artist is of German and Mongolian-Chinese descent and grew up between Berlin, Beijing and an Indigenous American community in the United States. Each root has provided him with a different perspective on the relationship between man and nature and how this manifests itself in divergent forms of spirituality.

In the West, the European relationship to nature is one of extraction, where land and living organisms are at the service of human beings. We see this model confirmed in European religions, which found their origin in an agricultural culture. In the spirituality of indigenous cultures, by contrast, the relationship to nature is defined by reciprocity and symbiosis. Here the human being is seen as only a part of a large ecosystem, and not as a master over nature.

Now we are confronted with Earth’s impending unlivability for man; like indigenous cultures, we need a spirituality of symbiosis in order to focus on the survival of our culture.

In the aftermath of the Tubbs megafire of 2017 in northern California, Si-Qin made 3D scans of several burned trees in the landscape. The results of this process were used as the starting point for this sculpture, first displayed at The High Line in New York in 2018. On a branch he fastened the New Peace logo, a recurrent element in his work. It refers to Timur Si-Qin's long-running project New Peace, which proposes a new kind of spirituality for the age of climate change, and transcends the dualism between nature and human culture.

Life on this planet stands at the cusp of a great threshold. As we awaken to the full scale of space and time, we awaken also to our own capacities for altering our planet and ourselves. Now more than ever, do humans need to construct new myths and express a new sense of spirituality.

Religions have always been technologies of belief, protocols for organizing environmental and social interactions. But today’s faiths, adapted for ancient agrarian conditions, no longer serve us, and in fact imperil our survival.

New Peace rejects the old dualisms of nature vs. culture and spirit vs. matter, instead fostering a non-dual conception of reality. It is a new protocol to understanding one’s place in the vastness of time and space and a toolkit for building new myths and meanings for a world undergoing profound changes. A radically inclusive, secular faith of the real. A mysticism for the anthropocene that fosters a spiritual relationship to matter itself. No divine beings, transcendent realms or eternal essences necessary: only the true infinite creativity of pattern, matter, and energy.

In Campaign for A New Protocol Part I, Si-Qin launches a drive to communicate a new sense of non-dualistic and secular spirituality adapted for the future. Against the backdrop of intricately rendered digital landscapes, New Peace proverbs present a spiritual framework for the world of the contemporary and the future. Here, the natural and the synthetic coalesce in a space beyond the spirit/matter dualities New Peace seeks to shed.

Campaign for a New Protocol, Part II was launched during Art Basel Hong Kong at Société’s booth. Si-Qin delves deeper into the substance of New Peace with Introduction to a New Protocol VR - a virtual reality experience and installation that immerses viewers in digitally rendered landscapes and in the new spirituality’s basic rhetoric.

Accompanying the project at Art Basel Hong Kong, Si-Qin launched a new book published in collaboration with Kaleidoscope Media. A New Protocol outlines the core tenets of New Peace as well as making a case for the urgency of it’s message. Si-Qin elaborates on the conceptual foundations of New Peace in the evolution of religion, science, and philosophy as well as its practical applicability to life today. A collection of his intricately rendered landscapes serve as visual guides for the artist’s presentation of what makes New Peace a spiritual framework for the world of the contemporary and the future.

Informed by a consistent examination of currents in art such as New Realism, Timur Si-Qin works on an emancipation of the image from subject-related interpretations, independent of linguistic or cultural codes. Is it true there no such thing as truth? (2017) forms part of the artist’s constant critical work with brand logos, where he develops a word-image logo consisting of a yin-yang symbol and the word peace. The consolidation and combination of these two different signifiers prevents a causal interpretation and leads ad absurdum the logocentric relationship between signifier and the signified. The four freestanding digital steles depict virtual landscapes, evoking a future New Materialism religion. The virtual landscape acts as an evolutionary-biological attractor that aims to create a state of well-being. The arrangement of the installation triggers associations with archaic-ritual sites.

Artforum described Si-Qin’s 2011 exhibition Mainstream, his first at Société and the first time the artist exhibited his Transformers work: “The artist lined the gallery’s two rooms with thirty-two computer printout copies of posters for the movie Transformers (2007) and overlaid each with plant leaves of varying shapes, sizes, and species. [...] Nature and culture, here framed in stark contrast to one another, nevertheless exist on the same plane. In fact, the logic of mechanical reproduction and the aesthetic of mass culture constitute our contemporary natural order. Si-Qin’s art, in the free rein that it takes on culture, simultaneously embodies the act of consumption and the ethos and forms of digital media. Contemporary society’s dissociation from a state of nature can be seen in the screen-tested aesthetic regime of Transformers, where lines deriving from American car production designate Optimus Prime as the kindred, benevolent protector, and organic design elements identify Megatron as an evil, foreign body threatening destruction.”

In the run-up to that exhibition, Si-Qin photographed each of the 32 collages, some more than once, and some at different stages in their development. This display consists of 22 of those photographs mounted in chrome frames; the collages’ frames are aluminum. Over the course of the 2011 exhibition, the plant matter in the collages deteriorated – wilted, browned, and began to rot, quickly, as organic matter tends to do, while the exhibition was still up. The collages incorporated the irreversible life cycle of consumption and planned obsolescence into their very nature. The second incarnation captures instances in the course of the collages’ deterioration but also preserves the moment in which some of them were new, pristine capturing the fantasy of newness through photography’s arm’s-length remove from reality.

In the years since 2011, Si-Qin has made work that exhibits an explicit relationship to Taoism, mainly through his incorporation of the Taiji into the PEACE visual identity with which he has branded many of his recent works. Si-Qin interprets the first line of the Tao – “The Tao is not the eternal Tao.” – as meaning that nothing stays the same. No solution is ever an eternal solution. He sees he Western tradition of criticality as a con ation of truth and beauty with moral righteousness. From an Eastern perspective, right and wrong are more interconnected, mutually manifest, and situated beyond the reach of human notions of right and wrong. The Transformers works don’t reference this tradition explicitly; the perspective is still nascent, emerging, in the work.