Sun Xun (b. 1980, Fuxin, China), and part of There is no ‘I’ in Team, a unique opportunity to see the work of an extraordinary and vibrant new generation of Chinese artists (mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau), working in moving image, sound and installation art, arguably the most prolific and strongest type of work being created in China at the time.
One of the most distinguished contemporary artists of his generation, Sun Xun deploys traditional Chinese ink painting and printing techniques to create ink paintings, charcoal drawings, woodcuts, animated films and installations of ambitious scale. Xun references Chinese mythology, European art traditions, literary classics and contemporary events. His thought-provoking works expose historical and current-day consumption, exploitation and political corruption. Hand-made films that use combinations of image, sound and text to raise questions about what we perceive as truth and explore memory, history, culture and politics.
The form and visual language of woodblock prints in his animated works highlighting the incongruities between authorised histories and personal recollections. Interrogating the differences between official narratives presented by public agencies, politicians and the media — and more marginalised accounts that stem from ordinary people’s experiences.
Sun Xun has been granted several prestigious awards including the 2010 CCAA Best Young Artists award, Taiwan Contemporary Art Link Young Art Award (2010) and the Civitella Ranieri Visual Arts Fellowship (2011/2012). He has held multiple solo exhibitions around the world, most notably at the MCA, Sydney; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at the Guggenheim, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern and Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei among other locations. In 2016 he was awarded the Audemars Piguet art commission, a project that toured from Miami Beach and Hong Kong to New York Times Square. Furthermore, his video work has been widely exhibited at film festivals around the world, from Germany and Austria, to Sweden, South Korea, Brazil and Iran. Furthermore, his film has been nominated by the Berlinale Shorts 2012 jury at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival and was presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2010. Sun Xun’s work is permanently held in the collections of the Guggenheim, Hammer Museum, Astrup Fearnley Museum, amongst others.
