From the wreckage of China’s industrial northeast, artist Sun Xun builds raft of memories to carry us to the future
The artist has memorialised the industrialisation of China’s northeast and its more recent decline, capturing the experiences of voiceless millions who lived through the country’s bloody march to modernity
Sun Xun is a rising star on the Chinese, if not international, contemporary art scene. Represented by ShanghART, a leading gallery on the mainland, the 36-year-old also has a work on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as part of a big group show on Chinese art.
His most recent exhibition, “Prediction Laboratory”, which ended last week at Shanghai’s Yuz Museum, echoed the tradition of intellectuals and artists such as Lu Xun, Liang Sicheng, and Ma Desheng, whose gloomy reflections on social problems are fuelled by their love of traditional Chinese aesthetics.
Sun’s short videos were compressed kaleidoscopes of painful memories and fantastic dreams, an accumulation of the folk history of China’s march to modernity, bought in blood. He smuggled the subjective experiences of China’s common people, curated by American art critic and author Barbara Pollack, into the heart of the country’s shiny showcase city.
Fuxin, in the industrial, decaying northeast, where Sun was born, in 1980, was the subject of his latest works. The region was one of those most brutally colonised by the Japanese, and became a heartland of communism, supported in its factories.
The northeast is now in a profound state of economic decay, much like post-industrial regions in the United States and Europe; China’s new economy has created winners but also losers. Artists native to the region, from the painter Liu Xiaodong to filmmaker Wang Bing, who created the gruelling nine-hour documentary West of the Tracks, have taken its realities as artistic inspiration.
