Sun Xun: A Footnote to Time

Feb 25, 2012 - Mar 10, 2012
Opening Reception: Feb 25, 4pm to 8pm
Daily Viewing by appointment: 3pm to 7pm
Following solo debuts at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Drawing Center in New York, Sun has recently transformed the music room of the former Beacon high school into an immersive, multifaceted installation. Employing a combination of ink-drawn murals, collage, newsprint, text, found objects, and shadow puppets, Sun has converted the most familiar of spaces into an uncanny theatrical set where visitors are invited to play roles. Staging a collision between the scene of suburban childhood education and a trans-cultural symbolic narrative, Sun forges an ambiguous space-time in which history, memory and national identity are porous and mutable-to inhabit it is to participate in a laboratory and projection screen for the public imagination.
Conceived partly in response to the dislocations of post-revolutionary China, Sun’s work explores the distortions of official history and commonplace perception. His distrust of received narrative has led him to assume the figure of a magician and jester, presiding over a twilight cosmos populated by clowns, animals, broken language, and military devices run amok. The result is often a sensory revel in the illusions that underpin collective reality.
Born in Fuxin, Sun studied printmaking at the China Academy of Fine Arts, switching to animation while still a student. He founded his own studio in 2006, and has since achieved international renown for his application of traditional Chinese drawing techniques to his distinctive style of filmmaking, which blends elements of political caricature with noir sensibilities and dystopian themes. He was named the Best Young Artist of 2010 by Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA), has served as artist-in-residence at Centraal Museum in Utrecht, Netherlands, screened his films at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries, and has been included in the 2012 Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival).