Sun Xun. Photo Courtesy of the Artist
It’s hard to miss his name in Chinese contemporary art. An artist on the rise, Sun Xun has been trotting around the globe holding exhibitions, completing residencies and producing art non-stop for the last few years. In addition, the New York Metropolitan Museum as well as the Museum of Modern Art recently acquired his work. Those exciting marks of recognition, however, have never made Sun Xun compromise his art. Having graduated from the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts, Sun uses printmaking, drawing and even calligraphy to construct layered, non-linear narrative animation films. As an artist, Sun Xun works comfortably at his own pace, unfolding stories from collective memory with an eerie sense of déjà vu.
Last Year in New York, Sun Xun occupied the entire gallery of Sean Kelly for the duration of one month as an artist in residence, rendering a four-channel video installation along with numerous drawings. The work was titled Time Vivarium, referring to his observations of a specific time period: the earlier years of the People’s Republic. More recently, Sun drew to a close an even larger intervention project for his residency in Hangzhou, China; he transformed a movie theater into a gigantic, immersive installation. With hand-made depictions of human figures, sacred animals and scenic mountains covering the cinema walls and ceilings, the artist once again abducted the viewer into queries, fantasies and other realities.
SUN XUN. The Time Vivarium, 2014 © Sun Xun. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York
SUN XUN. The Time Vivarium, 2014 © Sun Xun. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York
SUN XUN. The Time Vivarium, 2014 © Sun Xun. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York
Interview Translated by David Xu Borgonjon
Jiayin Chen: Many people learn of your work through animation, and categorize you as a new media artist. But your works are also traditional, including painting and calligraphy. We’re in a technological age. What’s your view on technology?
Sun Xun: Technology is only a formal change. There’s no essential change, only a formal switch. We’re always limited to the present, making judgments based on current experience. Like, we think that today’s technology is very advanced, compared to antiquity. They had chariots, we have cars. They had boats, we have planes. So we think the two aren’t the same. But try and think: does the you of today feel inconvenienced by the technological advances of the next two hundred years? In the future maybe a flight from China to the US will only take ten minutes, but in spirit and soul, has anything changed fundamentally? There’s a saying, “There’s no true face to Mt. Lu, only my body here on this hill.” For example, in China there are ideas of America: it’s prosperous, democratic, life is advanced, but when you actually live here, then all those ideas get flipped. The US proclaims itself to be democratic, but it’s directional, there’s no absolute freedom. As such, you’d be better off to say not that we live in the real, but in our imagination. This discussion’s related to the question of “prejudices,” actually.
JC: You’ve called your hometown “a surrealist city.” How has your upbringing affected your work?
SX: That’s right, Fuxin [in Northeast China] is a coal city. It’s like Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude, my hometown is Macondo. The path it took of change, development, is the same as Macondo’s from the start. The story takes a small place, and through surreal methods shows the history of a rise and fall. The things I felt at home were very, very similar to the novel’s descriptions. The recent economic development of China went from South to North, and I happened to experience the process in reverse. At any moment there were many ideological models around me. For example, in the South the economy was already really developed, they embraced consumer products, they had markets, but in the North it was still the planned economy. At the same time, you were subject to two opposed ideologies. In the North it was still politicized, there were slogans; in the South the market economy was already pretty lively.
SUN XUN. The Time Vivarium, 2014 © Sun Xun. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York
SUN XUN. The Time Vivarium, 2014 © Sun Xun. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York
JC: Your work, The Time Vivarium, drew from your experiences at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York. Can you talk about how you’ve made the connection between Chinese political history and American natural history?
SX: I visit the AMNH every time I come here. At the end of last year I stayed in New York for two months, and would visit the Museum often to try and find inspiration. The AMNH interprets the world from the perspective of American culture, and is fundamentally about the American people, their history, and their worldview. The AMNH has all kinds of models of people and animals, but it doesn’t have any “Americans.” There’s no “I” in the museum, only the understanding of the world from the view of the “I,” and this is a typical Western approach. There’s a “prejudice” at work here—and not in a bad way, since every civilization has its own way of understanding the world. Any people, any person. As a group or an individual it’s impossible to access the world without this prejudice, whether facing history or the natural world as it once was.
I wrote three short stories this time, and the feel for them came from my father’s story, or rather, his memories of history. So there were two conflicting perspectives on the world, one personal, and one natural. In terms of history, history in the official books is one kind of prejudice, and my father’s memories are another. The official perspective is going to have political motives, whereas we know that memory also lies sometimes, it’s colored by your emotions; so I wander between these two histories, and you can’t say which is real and which isn’t, since there’s no means to determine “absolute truth.” The AMNH deals with the same problem. My American friends tell me that in front of the entrance there’s a sculpture of a white man on a horse with a Native American on his left and a black man on his right, both much smaller than him. Observing the worldview that this sculpture manifests is interesting, in the same way that official histories and my father’s memories are.
JC: Your work works through a kind of transformative method. Are you saying you want the audience to project their own interpretation onto your work, and that would actually bring them closer to truth?
SX: Yes. You have to have your own prejudices, other people’s prejudices can’t be your prejudices. Not only the US, but the audience of the whole world is that way: they’ll attempt to find a footnote in your work to verify their understanding of Chinese culture, because they already have a notion of Chinese culture and art formed in their minds. So they just look for something to confirm that what they already think is right. Everyone has their own experiences, judgments, and preconceived answers, and they look for evidence to confirm that their interpretation is correct.
SUN XUN. The Time Vivarium, 2014 © Sun Xun. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York
SUN XUN. The Time Vivarium, 2014 © Sun Xun. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York
JC: In your work “Brave New World,” you used [Aldous] Huxley’s story as a thread. Would you say that those works investigated political ideologies?
SX: That show’s name comes from Huxley’s novel, which was the first of an anti-utopian trilogy: the first was the Russian We, and the second was Orwell’s 1984, and the third I just mentioned. It’s not just political ideologies but also the historical changes of human development; I actually de-emphasized political oppositions, like democracy and authoritarianism, or capitalism and communism, because all of these accounts are problematic. They’re essentially the same. To me, only the mode of governance is different. For example, using 1984 as a model, and China as an example, during Communist authoritarianism, many books were banned, confiscated, and the masses were only allowed to see content that had been seen already. But on the other hand, in China today, they don’t ban books anymore. If this book’s great but I don’t want anyone to read it, then I don’t have to ban it, I just print a thousand or ten thousand similar books and mix them in with the originals, so people also don’t end up reading the book. It achieves the same goal, and it’s how democratic governance works in my view. In a globalized, marketized age, how many people still read Shakespeare? You can get his books easily, but how many people do? They’re all different phases of human evolution, but in essence they’re the same.
JC: So, you don’t want people to link work to the political events in China when viewing them? Why you purposefully avoid linear narrative in making your work?
SX: My works have a notable feature, which is that among all the people who see them, 80% or 90% say that they don’t get it. My works are always talking about lots of things, but at the end it seems like they haven’t talked about anything, like they didn’t give people a 1-2-3-4 logical progression. I try to avoid that model, because answers are always chaotic to begin with, so I don’t really want to design a careful path for my viewers to walk along. I care more about representing chaos, rather than cleaning it up, since you can’t organize it, if you do, then that’s just prejudices. Before making an animation I’ll make a pile of drawings, and then those sketches will bit by bit transform into an animation. I don’t so much make them as they make themselves.
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