All That Is Solid Melts into Air: A Solo Exhibition by Shi Jinsong in Taipei

"All that is solid melts into air." - This line comes from a quotation in Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto. Leaving aside the context of the source text, this is likely the most fitting footnote for today's great era.

With the Internet, globalization, consumerism, and artificial intelligence sweeping across the globe, the power structure has radically changed—the system of knowledge, the mode of communication, and the way of life. The solids we believe today, let it be faith, power, culture, or even the institution, will one by one vanish into thin air. This change is not the result of a bloodshed revolution, but an imperceptible yet unstoppable engulfment that takes us over.

How to deal with the old times in the rear-view mirror, how to deal with the discipline and alienation of this new era, and how to deal with the relationship between ourselves and the times are not only realistic issues for every individual but also a head-on reality that faces every artist.

The world is changing too fast, and many of us are still caught in that perished, old world, making our avoidance, jesting, and confrontation seem somewhat silly and futile. Shi Jinsong is not standing on an elite pedestal to give condescending criticisms, nor is he staging a protest as a collective identity or ideology. He is not indolently hiding in a closed spiritual world to enjoy the failure of sadness, neither is he using a metaphor to express the simple reflection of sociological meanings.

From the early capitalist mode of production, sale and consumption of sugar shaped by the global market structure to the contemporary time where sugar is associated with joy, happiness and sweetness. The symbol of mass consumption of an era is reconstructed, where the work Sugar illustrates the ebb and flow of power, telling the story of the evolution in production and consumption. The cultural significance of Huashan and the man-made traces it brings reveal how the various "meanings" constructed by those in power determine the behavior and life of the people. Shi uses "burning" to destroy and reconstruct the functional and cultural significance of objects to suggest the fragility and irreversible nature of civilization. Daily necessities and Buddhist scriptures complement and cancel each other out in expressing the intricate relationship between the existence of individuals and the world. He absurdly "smuggles" works of art to deconstruct the power structure of contemporary art, the relations of production...

Shi Jinsong experiences the vicissitudes of time from an "individual identity", in which he constantly attempts to analyze, digest and rebuild the mode of production, power structure and knowledge field of the new era. Shi's unique creative thinking and methodology completes a form of individual's publicness. By means of "violent destruction" such as burning, hitting, tearing, grinding, and chemical reactions, Shi makes the appearance and illusion of objects disappear to reveal the inner truth. From the artist's perspective, this is the only way to face and dissect this era of great change and save oneself from becoming a part that melts into air.