07 Apr 2026
Timur Si-Qin on Exploring Morphogenesis, Sacredness of Living Systems and Post-Secular Ecologies
Interviewby Alexander Burenkov
Timur Si-Qin is a German-born, New York–based artist and writer whose practice operates at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, materiality, and culture. Over the past decade, he has emerged as a distinctive voice within a generation of artists often associated with post-internet aesthetics, not simply for his engagement with digital culture but for how he reconceptualizes the boundaries between the technological, the organic, and the cultural. Rather than dwelling on an antagonism between nature and technology—a common trope in ecological art—Si-Qin treats these domains as symbiotic and co-productive, exploring how human civilization is itself a part of the larger ecology of the planet.
Central to his work is the long-term project New Peace, a conceptual and spiritual initiative that seeks to cultivate a nature-centric worldview and a post-secular protocol for understanding humanity’s relationship with the natural world. New Peace proposes an ontology in which humans do not occupy a privileged position over non-human life but are instead interwoven with plants, animals, minerals, and landscapes within a shared ecosystem of signification and meaning. By reimagining spiritual systems and symbolic structures, Si-Qin challenges the dualism of traditional Western thought that separates culture from nature, or mind from matter. This conceptual framework is deeply influenced by his multicultural background and life experiences—growing up with roots in Germany, China, and within a San Carlos Apache Native American community in the American Southwest—which inform his sensitivity to diverse cultural cosmologies and relationships to the land. It also shapes his interest in morphology and morphogenesis—the aesthetic and philosophical study of forms and structures in nature and culture. His approach is not purely critical or ironic (as is often the case in works labeled “post-internet”), but instead generative and speculative, proposing alternative ways of seeing and being.
Alexander Burenkov: Your work often investigates the relationship between nature and culture. How do you see this evolving within the context of a post-digital aesthetic?
Timur Si-Qin: Somewhat counterintuitively, I think we are moving toward a new age of nature—a time in which nature reasserts, or perhaps re-reveals, her sovereignty. Not as something opposed to human culture, but as the larger field that has always contained it. Ultimately, nature is in control and has graciously afforded us our existence.
From this perspective, the digital condition is not a departure from nature but a discovery of possibilities already latent within it—specifically through our engagement with the affordances of rocks: silica, carbon, and other metals. A semiconductor, after all, is simply a very precisely organized and engraved piece of rock. And AI neural networks are patterned flows of information whose basic schematics already existed within the possibility space of the world. Seen this way, the digital condition is simply a continuation of the natural world.
AB: New Peace functions as both a conceptual project and a spiritual protocol. How has the philosophical basis of New Peace changed over recent years?
TS: The basic idea behind New Peace began with the recognition that within Western spiritual traditions, we lost nature as the central subject a long time ago—and that this loss is deeply tied to the environmental crisis we are now facing.
Most cultures on Earth have historically maintained nature-centered spiritualities. In that sense, it is the Western tradition that is the aberration. Having grown up within a Native American spiritual context, I witnessed these differences firsthand. As Vine Deloria Jr. writes, Westerners are caught in the abstraction of time. Within Western religious traditions, what matters is what happened in history and what will happen in prophecy. There is a fixation on eschatology, while we mistreat and destroy the real heaven that is the living world around us.
Indigenous religions, by contrast, tend to place less emphasis on distant pasts or speculative futures, and more emphasis on concrete relationships with real animals, plants, and ecosystems. In this sense, indigenous religions are much more realistic and materially grounded. However, we cannot expect Western societies to suddenly convert to Lakota or Yup’ik cosmologies. Instead, the more productive task is to begin articulating what a contemporary spirituality of nature might look like.
Today, we are rightly suspicious of the power dynamics and dogmatism of organized religion. And yet, as a species, we are evolved to use shared spiritual frameworks to coordinate behavior at a societal scale. I have long felt that contemporary art might be one of the traditions capable of evolving in this direction. At its best, art is a reservoir of spirituality, and contemporary art may be one of the first organic expressions of a global, post-secular spirituality. Initially, I thought such an expression needed to be strictly secular. But after years of engagement with ayahuasca traditions, I find the secular label less important—and ultimately more complicated than I once believed.
AB: In A Vision of You (2024) at Magician Space, where you presented sculptural works that serve as sacred iconographies of plant life from the Hengduan Mountain Range—a biodiverse region in Western Sichuan, plants become the central icons of your visual language. What do these forms reveal about your evolving sense of ecology and post-secular spirituality?
TS: Centering plants as icons is a way of quietly shifting the axis of sacred representation. Instead of projecting transcendence onto anthropomorphic figures, I’m interested in locating sacredness within living systems themselves.
Plants embody a kind of distributed intelligence and deep time that feels closer to how I understand spiritual continuity today. They are not symbols of something beyond the world—they are already expressions of relational complexity, interdependence, and becoming.
AB: How did the exhibition invoke indigenous cosmologies and ancient cultures’ reverence for nature by replacing anthropocentric figures with plants as focal points of spiritual veneration?
TS: Many indigenous cosmologies understand plants, animals, and landscapes as persons, agents, and teachers rather than objects. By adopting plant forms as iconographic centers, the works echo this worldview. It’s less about quoting specific cosmologies and more about creating a visual situation in which viewers are invited to experience non-human life as worthy of reverence and attention. We primates think we run the world, but I suspect the plants still do.
AB: How does working with materials like bronze and LED screens help you navigate between the organic and the synthetic?
TS: From a post-anthropocentric perspective, I’m drawn to treat all things as existing on equal ontological footing—what philosophers Ian Bogost and Graham Harman refer to through the idea of a “Latour litany.”
This approach overlaps strongly with animistic worldviews, in which humans are simply one type of animal among many, and the objects and technologies we create are extended phenotypes of our species—no different, in principle, from termite mounds or seashells. All of this unfolds within the domain of nature. From this position, my work samples freely across materials and technologies, from bronze to LED screens, without assigning moral hierarchies to either.
AB: How does digital technology inform your material practice?
TS: Fundamentally, I don’t believe in technology as a hard ontological category in itself. Since the use of ochre in cave painting, art has always been at the forefront of technological exploration. Digital tools function as extensions of my perceptual and morphological thinking. I use 3D scanning, for example, as a way to work with forms found in nature without having to physically extract or destroy them, as traditional sculptural processes often require.
What interests me is how digital processes mirror biological ones—iterative, generative, and often semi-autonomous. This parallel reinforces the idea that computation itself can be understood as a property of nature.
AB: Could you describe the conceptual link between morphology/morphogenesis and your artistic practice?
TS: Morphology concerns the study of form; morphogenesis concerns how form comes into being. I’m interested in both the appearance of things and the processes that generate them.
In my early work, I focused on the morphological processes of contemporary image culture. Like many early post-internet artists, I investigated commercial and mass-cultural imagery and the latent systems that produced them, looking for deeper parallels to evolutionary morphogenesis. I understood this as a fundamentally political project. Over time, these investigations led me toward what I consider the deepest layer of cultural morphogenesis: religion and spirituality. Around 2016, this shift coincided with the transformation of my brand-as-sculpture Peace into what became New Peace.
AB: In recent exhibitions, these works suggest a “de-anthropocentrification” of the sacred. How do you conceive of sacredness in relation to non-human life?
TS: For me, what is sacred is very simple and very concrete: this Earth, the animals, plants, rocks, soils, waters, the sunsets and sunrises, and everything in between.
AB: How has your multicultural upbringing influenced your ideas about the post-digital era and cross-cultural ecological narratives?
TS: Growing up across multiple cultural contexts made it difficult for me to accept any single cosmology as universal. That instability became productive—it opened space to think of belief systems as modular, evolving, and adaptive.
AB: In your sculptures, there’s often a tension between the timeless and the technologically new. How do you balance these temporalities?
TS: I don’t see them as opposites. Technologies are simply the latest form of magic. Meanwhile, the human desire to create meaning, ritual, and symbolic form is ancient. By combining emerging technologies with archetypal material languages, I try to honor the Mother herself using the various magics available to me.
AB: How do you approach the idea of “distributed meaning systems,” and how is this reflected in the works you’ve shown recently?
TS: Rather than embedding a single, closed meaning into an object, I think of each work as a node within a larger symbolic ecology. Meaning emerges through relations—between materials, images, viewers, contexts, and time. This mirrors ecological systems, where no single element contains the whole.
AB: Many of your works embody ideas usually discussed in philosophy or ecology. How do you see your practice as a form of philosophical inquiry?
TS: In my early work, I was very much drawn to contemporary strains of philosophy, because art is really a form of embodied thought. I was especially drawn to new materialisms and speculative realisms, as I recognized them as moments where Western intellectual traditions began to catch up to Indigenous thought. This path ultimately led me back to the importance of spirituality.
AB: With post-internet culture often associated with irony and critique, why do you think your work gravitates towards sincerity and spiritual speculation instead?
TS: Who has time for irony? Irony is a powerful tool, but it tends to stabilize into a defensive posture. I’m more interested in what might be built than in what can be dismantled.
AB: What new directions or questions are you currently pursuing in your studio—especially in relation to the post-digital condition and ecological consciousness?
TS: I’m currently training AI models on my nature photography of specific ecosystems and producing photographic works from this process. It’s an emerging mode of photography in which what is being imaged is the latent space of a landscape rather than the landscape itself. I believe this modality will become a new photographic paradigm. At a broader level, I’m asking how art might participate in the formation of new spiritual grammars appropriate to an age of planetary crisis.
BIOGRAPHY
Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.
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