Brilliant Ideas Episode #46: Sun Xun

Sun Xun crosses the line between film and fine art, for animation, that represents him covers the two areas. However, he does not introduce himself as an artist or an animated film director. As can be seen from him saying “animation is a combination of painting and film” and “all things can be related to animation,” the artist regards animation as an open medium that can be connected to everything, and the film and art scenes, with which animation is involved, are in the same context. For example, Sun Xun defines painting as a moment in time captured in an image, while saying a film is a narrative that crosses the continuum of time and space. Therefore, having the characteristics of both media, animation is, even as a single piece, a mixture of various genres including films, drawings, sounds, and paintings.

The Cultural Revolution that swept across China in the 1960s is still an inspiration to many Chinese artists. Sun Xun is no exception, saying that anyone in the Chinese art and culture scene cannot avoid the effects of this huge historic event.
<Some Actions Which Haven’t Been Defined Yet in the Revolution>(2011), an experiment on whether Chinese history can be reflected to the artist’s everyday life as a Chinese and an artist, reveals his thoughts on the history of China. Born after the Cultural Revolution, the artist grew up seeing communist slogans as a child. He even learned Chinese history in two different ways: the official way of learning it from the history textbooks in school classes, and the unofficial way of listening to his father’s stories, who experienced the revolution himself. There were great differences between the versions of the Cultural Revolution taught by the state and that remained in the memories of Sun Xun’s father. After finding such differences, Sun Xun realized absurdness in today’s so-called “real” history and gave himself 10 years to calmly attend to the work.

One of the rising stars in China, Sun Xun is an after generation of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Growing up in the era after the revolution, he had great interest for world history and culture, and eventually this has become seeds for his work. Sun Xun is particularly interested in the gap between the way the public may think about a historical event and the way that the media officially releases the same event. The artist explores this difference with surrealistic animations. Therefore, visitors can have both a realistic and further a mystical experience.
Born in 1980, Sun Xun now lives and works in Beijing. He studied printmaking at the China Academy of Fine Arts. In 2006, he found his own animation studio named Pi Animation Studio. He has had several solo exhibitions, including at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Hayward Gallery, London, the Drawing Center, New York and has shown his works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ‘Shanghai Biennale’, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver.