Artist 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.

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.

Land of the Lustrous evinces a moral outlook that exceeds humanism: namely, the belief that the laws obeyed by humans are only a part of those that govern the material world at large. 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 frst 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 Trans- formers, 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.