Sun Xun

Drawings: signed and dated 2006 on the reverse
This is from an edition of six. 

Wedel Gallery, London
Acquired direcly from the above by the current owner

New York, The Drawing Center, Sun Xun: Shock of Time, Feb. 20-March 28, 2009, pp. 40-63, illustrated

This work is in generally very good condition overall. The newspaper is yellowing especially along the edges which is inherent to the medium. Otherewise there are no apparent condition problems with this work.
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In a 2006 interview, when asked about the Shock of Time (Lot 716)animation he had just completed, Sun Xun responded that, "My works become single segments of a continuum."[1] Appropriate words given that now, several years later, Sotheby's will offer twenty-five of the "single segments" that make up one of the most exciting and impressive works by an artist of China's most recent generation. Born in 1980, Sun Xun engages in his work with theory and history at a level that belies his age. He is among the first Chinese artists to have come of age in direct conversation with international contemporary art, rather than in its shadow or completely beyond its pale as was the case for generations past. In one sense, Sun's animation Shock of Time is a reflection on the temporal upheaval that made his own coming of age possible.

 

To grasp the starting point for this extremely intricate narration, in which a story unfolds in ink painted on old newspapers dating to well before Sun Xun's birth, one might look at the artist's graduation paper from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, titled, "Time, History, and Society." That essay rehashes elements of post-structural philosophy, asking where art fits into a society that is so intent on telling its own authoritative story. Likewise, Shock of Time begins with the written line, "History is a lie of time," as a story about memory, writing, and history unfolds on the painted palimpsests of newspapers documenting the events of the Cultural Revolution. The geographical outline of China emerges from the textual chaos, changing shape as the years spin by at an accelerated pace. A man, seeming to personify time, appears from the fringes and begins speaking incomprehensibly over a megaphone. Clocks and figures appear but are ultimately swept away in tides of paper.

 

Asked in the aforementioned 2006 interview with curator Beatrice Leanza what he is striving for in his animations, Sun Xun replied simply, "Truth." His readings and meditations have led him to believe in the utter mutability of history, and thus only by accepting this transience by means of a medium in which "each subsequent image is a negation of the previous one" does he feel truth as a narrative possibility. Of course such theoretical complexity does nothing to diminish the look and feel of these unique ink on newspaper images, here seen as pictures in their own right, not the relics or remnants of a time-based work. Sun Xun's "single segments" reward close individual viewing. And together they chart the vicissitudes of a tumultuous history—even (or particularly) one that someone born in 1980 can only imagine.

[1] Interview with Beatrice Leanza, in Touching the Stones: China Art Now, ed. Waling Boers, Bucchhandlung Walther Koenig and Timezone 8, 2006, p. 197.