Jianshu Song: I Am My Own Era

Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456 is pleased to present Jianshu Song: I Am My Own Era, curated by Zihan(Rose) Zhang on view from April 11, 2025, through May 2, 2025.

Exhibition Statement
New York - a city shaped by generations of migrants, is both a product of globalization and a stage where individual destinies intersect. Drawing on a life trajectory that spans both China and the United States, artist Jianshu Song places the motif of ‘plants’ at the heart of this exhibition. Through a multi-dimensional articulation of material states and constructed relationships, the works explore how individuals negotiate forms of existence amid shifting temporal, institutional, and spatial conditions.

Plants such as cotton, cocoa, and opium have played complex and consequential roles in the evolution of globalization. They have not only redrawn the world’s geographic and economic contours but have also entangled countless individual lives in their transactional circulation. Globalization, after all, has never been a gentle march of shared progress - it has advanced through cycles of displacement, disruption, and domination. The work Cotton Empire lays the groundwork for Song’s sustained inquiry into the structural logic of the present. Using cotton, a transregional crop, as a point of entry, he revisits how institutional restructuring and labor distribution have historically shaped lived conditions in which individuals are situated.

The previous generation of Chinese migrants, driven by a filtered vision of the ‘American Dream’, took root in heterogeneous environments with a plant-like resilience. As part of a later wave of migration, Song came of age at the height of globalization, only to witness its unravelling in the present. In an era of hyper-connectivity and deepening division, individual trajectories are increasingly drawn into the gravitational pull of historical grand narratives. It is fromthis contradiction that Song’s practice takes shape—examining how individual value is encoded, mobilized, and consumed within systems of circulation. Such concerns first surfaced in his debut work At Last (2010), in which he preserved the tree’s roots, removed its branches, and shaped a sharply upright trunk pointing skyward—a condensed expression of life’s final will. The piece poses a fundamental question: to be swept along by history, or to carve a way through?

This inquiry, grounded in personal experience, also speaks to the broader dilemmas and shared effect of immigrant communities. For irregular migrants who leave behind their original social systems and carry with them the cultural soil of origin—does migration truly open up new freedoms, or merely redraw the boundaries of constraint? Cliff gestures toward the stark reality that the so-called option may, in fact, be a forward motion with no return for those born from the fractures of the era itself.

The erosion of external structures finds its counterpart in an inward turn within Song’s artistic practice. In Non-Symbiotic Relation, incompatible materials are conjoined into a provisional structure—appearing stable, yet
always teetering on the edge of collapse. This precarious state mirrors the contemporary condition of individuals in relation to systems and to each other—bound together, yet never truly integrated. This unresolved tension, sustained yet unstable, in turn pushes the artist to confront his own creative impasse. Song comes to recognize that in the face of structural disintegration, expression itself grows brittle— its meaning dissolving before it can take shape. His attention gradually shifts from language and concept to the material’s physical presence and unfolding condition.

Innately Sufficient marks the full realization of this inward turn. In this work, Song no longer seeks to impose meaning upon the material, nor does he ask what it ought to represent. Instead, he embraces a medium—expanding foam—that is malleable yet resists total control. Construction unfolds through intuition and responsiveness, generating form in real time. Each configuration emerges as a singular encounter between hand and matter—unrepeatable and irreducible. Material is no longer a vessel for meaning, but becomes the ground upon which the artist reconciles with himself and reconfigures an inner order.

The works in this exhibition do not seek to illustrate the grand narratives of our time, but begin from the artist’s own position within it—transforming lived experience under the weight of history into a material practice, one that takes shape through time as a form of inner order. This order is neither grand nor complete, but it is concrete, lived, and honest. We may not be able to name the era in its entirety, but you can still determine how to inhabit it—and how to live meaningfully within its shifting terrain.

‘I am my own era’ is not a rhetorical posture, but a sustained practice of self-assertion—one that takes reconstruction as its method and existence as its core. In a moment when the framework of globalization is loosening, this way of working—grounded in material inquiry, self-construction, and the reshaping of lived conditions—is no longer a response to the era, but a deliberate claim to one’s place within it.

By Zihan(Rose) Zhang

Opening Reception: April 11, 2025, 6-8pm

Please contact info@caacarts.org for more information.