Timur Si-Qin

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.

For Beaufort, Si-Qin is showing his work Forgiving Change. In the aftermath of the Tubbs megafire of 2017 in northern California, he 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.