Pristine, Part I: Timur Si-Qin

Pristine, Part I begins from the proposition that the pristine still exists. Across the planet, fragments of ecologically intact wilderness remain: places where ancient relationships between species continue, and where the self-organizing intelligence and grace of the living world remain vividly present. For Si-Qin, these places are living realities rather than projections of a lost Eden—proof that heaven on Earth persists in the present. 

And yet the pristine has, in some sense, become unbelievable. Images of immense forests, unfamiliar plants and extraordinary densities of life now appear almost fantastical: too lush, too strange, too beautiful to feel entirely real. Pristine, Part I emerges from Si-Qin’s radical encounters with such environments, and from the conviction that these experiences can fundamentally reorganize our sense of what is real and what is valuable. 

The works in the exhibition emerge through observation, documentation and other metabolizations of particular plant species in the Peruvian Amazon. The resulting sculptures—of roots, trunks, leaves and other botanical forms—carry these experiences of particular beings and sacred places into another form. 

The exhibition continues Si-Qin’s longstanding interest in articulating a contemporary spirituality of nature. His work locates the sacred within life itself, and in the recognition that human existence unfolds inside a vastly larger living world. For Si-Qin, spirituality has a role in making the value of that world felt: in recognizing the Earth’s remaining ecologically rich and self-sustaining places as among the great treasures of reality, where paradise persists in the flourishing and abundance of life itself. 

Pristine, Part I insists on what remains. The planet’s surviving wildernesses are living realities in the present, reminding us that heaven is not elsewhere. It is here, still alive—and our task is to protect what remains and make room for it to expand.