Sun Yuan: Testing the Public with Art

Compared with other big cities in China, Beijing is a considerably ideal venue in terms of promoting experimental arts - although new art exhibitions are frequently aborted by the local police, Beijing is an otherwise international city where experimental art projects are easily accessible internationally.
Encouraged by the current booming of new Chinese art on the global art stage, Beijing is increasingly becoming a new arts center in China over time. Many new art shows erupt where talented young artists emerge overnight - especially, for instance, a great deal of underground art shows which took place simultaneously, such as Corruptionist, Post-sensibility, It's me, and Self-reflection.

Sun Yuan is one of those artists who is extensively involved in many art exhibitions, and who quickly emerged as a cutting - edge artist. Sun Yan, a very tall and strong guy, grew up in Beijing and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts(Zhongyang meishu Xueyuan) in 1991. He specialises in oil painting.

His oil painting presents a sensual feeling, his subjects are often bright flowers and hip beauties, somewhat deformed and exaggerated figures, like cartoon images. His oil painting appears as expressionist's vision and is toned with contemporary Chinese images, such as thickly makeup cover girls and fashionable celebrities. Many of his works are associated with food, wine, fruit, ice cream, water, and floating beauties, which symbolize the luxury and tastelessness of contemporary Chinese urban life, somewhat cynically and metaphorically.

Like many of his generation, Sun Yuan works as a freelance artist, surviving through the sale of his painting. This is not an easy career for those who chose art as his/her life-long commitment - wherever and whenever they are. He has chosen what he wants, rather what he needs.

"I was a very good student when I was a teenager, but I was truly naughty, therefore I couldn't be admitted by the Young Pioneer and Youth League" he commented about his earlier experiences.
"But this does not mean that I was an ordinary student. I was deeply fascinated with drawing. When I was a primary school student, instead of going to school, I went to Beijing the Zoo to practice sketch very often and my parents were really proud of my keen hobby and promising talent, you know how much Chinese parents like to cultivate their child's art-related hobbies.' Sun continues," even my mother took me to Beijing Zoo every week, rather than going to work ." A smile appeared on his face.

Sun Yuan told me that he liked small animals very much when he was a kid, such creatures as rabbit, turtle, frog, hedgehog, pigeon, and cricket were once his intimate friends. That's why he tends to use small animals to construct his installation artworks.

In the fall of 1998, Sun Yan and his art partner Xiao Yu presented their two-man-show, entitled Inset, at the Tongdao Gallery in the Central Academy of Art. They reconstructed the space and walls, turning the corridor into a refrigerator. In the narrow passage a great deal of live creature, such as lobster, crab, and fish were inlaid into the white wall. They looked like then had been frozen in a biology lab. This was an outrageous exhibition for the Central Academy of Art, a conventional and conservative art institute. " I like the way in which the creatures were presented there. It was a moment when death and life integrate. Their strong smell, shining crust, and unique physical appearances remind visitors of the brilliance and diversity of life."

In the winter of 1997, Sun Yuan and Xiao Yu executed the performance work, shepherd, in the wilderness of Beijing's outskirts. Many sheep backbones were juxtaposted neatly on the snow-covered ground, with red flesh and blood still attached to the backbones. In this inferno-like horrible field, two wrapped monsters, disguised by the artists, were wandering among the skeletons, picking up one thing and laying down another continuously. Sun Yuan made the following statements for this integral work of installation and performance.

"Reality is certainly dominated by materialism. People tend to rectify their lost intellect by purifying their soul. Human souls cannot overcome the mundane world. Only the spirit contributes the soul and body to transcending the boundary of materialism. The anti-materialistic powers have spirituality, even though we cannot precisely explain what the spirit is. Sometimes spirit can be disconnected from its crust, and one gets nothing when he wants me to detect spirit with a materialist's glasses, as if the shepherd's shadow overcast the illusionary white grassland."
The statements are very philosophical, yet they express artist's serious meditation. They also provide some clue to understanding the work.

"Your work, I guess, is not only associated with your childhood penchant, but is also connected to your strong appetite, right?" I asked him. "Correct, that's why I am so tall and big" this 100kg heavy and 1.91m tall guy replied, with the sense of humor of a naughty boy.

His use of live object turned out to be very controversial when he presented his new installation called Honey in the Post-sensibility show in Beijing's alternative art exhibition space - actually the bomb shelter of a residential compound. In the center of his own basement gallery, Sun Yuan installed a bed carpeted with a big block of ice. An infant corpse and aborted baby lay on the ice. Underneath this tiny and frozen baby, an old man's stuffy and gray face reached out from the ice. The room was dark and cold. Artificial lighting highlight the baby and old man, as well as the white ice.

Many visitors first regarded the baby and the old man as manmade sculptures. They were obviously shocked when they were informed that they were corpses, and then responded with complicated feelings. Why corpses? Why dead baby? In her catalogue essay, curator Wu Meicun made the following interpretation:

"In Sun Yuan's artwork, the infant is frozen in big ice. The bed image formed by ice and the image of the tomb and womb connect and separate from each other frequently. But the bigger antithesis, it is the accurate thrust aroused by amazement of the people all around."

Sun Yuan also discussed his idea of dealing with death in his installation work:" I often think about death now that I have grown up. When I was young, I never thought about it, since it was still very far from my life. I thought recently that life and death are one process of a life, two different conditions of the same thing. On the other side, thinking about death is a kind of concern of my personal life." Sun Yuan continued " I do hope that death is a somewhat beautiful and significant matter, since he/she is moving forward into another world which is shaped by our imaginations." The artist's note provides us with another dimension.

With the new century approaching, the expectation for the near future remains problematic; everything is possible and nothing is reliable, especially, at moment when transformational China is engulfed with materialism and hedonism. Animals and corpses have become references with which people can identify themselves. Therefore Sun Yun would like to see them as material for constructing his arts which forces the audience to consider who are they.

" I believe that what I am doing is significant, even though visitors do not always understand it and some probably just attack me. Just like the "clone" issue, the development of technology always stirs social debate, even conflict. Whether you like it or not, it doesn't matter. People will use new eyee to see the new things".

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