Jin Shan: All Begins with The Body…

Artist: Jin Shan

Curator: Hou Hanru

Jiayuanhai Art Museum presents All Begins with The Body…, a major commissioned solo exhibition by Jin Shan, curated by Hou Hanru, on view from May 1, 2026 for nearly three months. Working with new materials and a cycle of continuous forming and breaking, Jin Shan develops a new sculptural language that tests what sculpture can mean in the digital age. Installed within Tadao Ando’s rigorously ordered galleries, the works engage the tensions between inside and outside, enclosure and openness, pointing to an urgent contemporary predicament under techno-fetishism: when human alienation is disguised as technological progress, how does techno-fervor obscure the body’s authenticity and vulnerability?

Through a direct dialogue between sculpture and site, the exhibition reveals how technology and today’s living conditions are reshaping human identity. Curator Hou Hanru notes that under globalized neoliberal logic, “mechanical capitalism” increasingly governs daily life, reducing individuals to AI- and tech-defined “dividuum.” [1]Jin Shan’s works confront this reality and pose a core question: in an age of corporal alienation and breakdown, how do we restore “corporal integrity”? Rooted in contemporary China yet addressing a universally shared condition, the exhibition ultimately reminds us not to lose sight of the body as the subject of perception.

Following Shen Shaomin’s early-opening solo exhibition Rice: Verses for the Hungry Soul, which traced life’s origins and everyday memory, Jiayuanhai Art Museum again initiates a deep examination of a contemporary artistic case. With Jin Shan’s major commissioned solo exhibition, the museum shifts its research focus—from explorations of land-based roots to a sharp interrogation of the human condition under technological alienation. Through a site-reconfiguring sculptural syntax, the artist renews the force of the works within the museum’s “art laboratory,” positioning art as a vital medium for reflecting on contemporary technological worship. 

As an institution deeply committed to artist-centered case studies, Jiayuanhai Art Museum will continue its in-depth collaboration model of commissioned solo exhibitions—examining representative individual “samples” within art history and excavating the tensions and symbioses between artists, urban evolution, and vernacular civilization. Situated at the boundary between nature and the city, the museum will keep using art as a medium to capture the trajectories of contemporary art’s transformations, becoming a key site for constructing future artistic narratives.

[1] Gerald Raunig, Dividuum,Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution, Semiotext(e), 2016