Jin Shan’s works evoke a fundamental question about sculpture’s social meaning. Sculpture, as an “efficient and singularly material” art form, has always been bound up with the human desire to seek “self-identity” and “self-affirmation”: from the human figure “liberated” from the architectural framework of Gothic churches, to the return of the secular world since the Renaissance, human desire, spirit, and sentiments were able to find a dwelling location again, a home.
In an age we call “the contemporary”, the logic of globalized neoliberalism has made self-recognition increasingly fractured: an unprecedented alienation of humanity is disguised as technological progress; endless “self-competition”  turns the individual into a “dividuum” , and this tendency accelerates amid “machinic capitalism”  and the tide of Artificial Intelligence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty once reminded us: “The world’s problems can begin with the problems of the body.”  In today's crisis of bodily alienation, we need to create new aesthetic languages to reimagine our body.
Jin Shan has awakened to this urgency. It becomes his main motivation to develop this exhibition commissioned by Jiayuanhai Art Museum. Through Tadao Ando’s almost “ritualized” spatial order, the project holds up a mirror to our era’s worship of technology: how does technological fanaticism obscure the vulnerability of the body?
In the gallery, repeated falls and muffled thuds make the soft Su-Jin-Ki   collapse flat and then recover with each rise and drop. Nearly fifty cracked clay figures lie stacked and scattered, “each fissure like a silent cry.” In a dark chamber, glass-blown organs, transparent and fragile, force us to re-cognize the body’s boundaries. A railing running through the space splits the route in two: it is both obstacle and support; the body is both supported and bound. Finally, the work extends outdoors: the artist’s tools are pre-buried underground, and visitors cast them in plaster, confronting the question of what we are copying—the tools’ forms, or the invisible force of discipline behind them.

Art, incarnating the corporal existence of human life, and all lives, is not only a matter of appearance but also its fate: disappearance…  As Louise Bourgeois once insisted, sculpture is “like the pruning of a tree”[1]: the tree may wilt in a freezing winter, and the flowers may fall and buried by dusts… But, it’ll certainly blossom again when spring returns… 

[1] Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century (French-American). Her work often revolves around the body, memory, trauma, and repair.