Justin Hess, Harini Kadambi, Xun Zhou, Taisha Venort March 2012.
of an Sun Xun
Transcript of of an Sun Xun
Sun Xun, photographed on August 22, 2017, in his studio in Caochangdi District, Beijing
Time has been fundamental to the practice of
the Chinese artist who was born in 1980 and
grew up in Fuxin, Liaoning Province, a
prefecture-level city suffering from over-
mining and environmental damage resulting
from industrial emissions, waste dumps, and
coal-mine gangue stockpiles. Sun Xun
makes politically charged stop-motion
animations that investigate time and history, memory and reality,
modernity and dystopia. “Only time can be both huge and limited,”
he said during an interview with myartguides.com.
A printmaker by training, he employs a wide array of media
including palimpsest, painting, woodcut, calligraphy, and drawing,
imbued with Kafka-like poetic, dreamy, dark and satirical
undertones. Sun often incorporates the word “time” in the titles of
works, delinearizes narratives, and relies on the recurrent motifs of
a crow, man with a top hat, factory chimney, smoke, and fantastical
animals to thread together various scenes and themes that are
preoccupied with notions of time, the shifting narrative of history,
and the absurdity of reality.
It is, however, Sun’s labour-intensive production process,
enormous assembly team, and grandiose scale of undertaking that
have made him a darling of the art world. The Time Vivarium
(2014), for example, is an eight-minute, four-channel video
animation installation. The fast-moving montages of fantastical
animals and dire landscapes are the result of the artist’s editing of
his father’s recollections of China’s modern history combined with
references of ideologically codified dioramas at the American
Museum of Natural History to create a théâtre de l’absurde in the
French tradition, revealing a disillusioned, daunting, and
preposterous world in which the officially contrived accounts of
history dominate the collective mind.
At a dinner at Art Basel last June, Olivier Audemars remarked
that the artist was a logical choice for the second Audemars
Piguet Art Commission, which the Swiss watch manufacturer
launched “to support artists in the creation of works of
exceptional complexity, precision, and experiential impact on an
ongoing, annual basis”. The commission resulted in Sun’s most
ambitious project to date, Reconstruction of the Universe, an
installation combining film with architectural and design
elements. Undertaken by more than 100 artists, who created over
10,000 hand-cut woodblock prints, and filmed with both two and
three-dimensional technologies, Time Spy is a 10-minute 3-D
stop-motion film which tells the story of a magician who is on a
quest to reconstruct time and the universe. It was projected
during Art Basel Miami Beach in 2016 onto flat and spherical
surfaces in an ocean-side pavilion with a swooping bamboo roof
designed by the artist, and became one of the highlights of the art
fair. The animation was then selected for Midnight Moment, the
world’s largest, longest-running digital art exhibition, and was
screened nightly throughout July 2017, from 11:57 to midnight
on six colossal electronic billboards in Times Square. �
P O R T R A I T o f a n A R T I S T
B y F A B I E N F R Y N S
Sun Xun
P H O T O G R A P H B Y P A T R I C K W A C K
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