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 accelerating rate of social and cultural change in modern society. 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 inventions, connecting ideas of growth and decay of the environment with production and waste of capitalistic society. The artist’s hyper-stylized bamboo sculptures hybridize the archaic and the futuristic, the analog and the digital, to express the simultaneously increasing 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 this phenomenon and contemplate the future that awaits us if we stay in the race.

About the artist

Based in Wuhan and Beijing, China, Shi Jinsong (b. 1969, Wuhan) graduated with a B.F.A. in sculpture from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, China, in 1994. He is represented by Eli Klein Gallery, New York. Shi Jinsong’s artistic practice includes sculpture, painting, garments, furniture, architecture, and film, often set within digital and participatory environments. His works are deeply rooted in anatomy and aim to bring about an awakening of public consciousness. The artist’s work was included in Alors, la Chine? at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in solo exhibitions at Chambers Fine Art, New York; HOW Art Museum, Shanghai; and SOMA Museum of Art, Seoul. His work is held in the collections of major institutions around the world including the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Groninger Museum, the Netherlands; M+, Hong Kong; and White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, Australia.