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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