Sun Xun’s career and artistic style

Sun Xun is seen as one of the most promising and upcoming young artists from China. Born in 1980 (MCA, 2018). He is best known for his animations based on charcoal drawings, woodcuts, of ink paintings. His artworks based on images, sounds and texts explore the dynamics of culture, history, and politics. He highlights the marginalized narratives and accounts from ordinary people’s experiences and personal recollections. Sun Xun’s first solo exhibition in The Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia has been curated by Anna Davis. The exhibition showcases his most essential artworks (MCA, 2018). The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia showcases the paintings, woodcuts, drawings, installations, and animated videos done by Sun Xun in the last decade (Fang, 2018). Every brushstroke and element creates a symbolic visual language that speculates on the current world within an imaginative space created by the artist.  The paper analyzes Sun Xun’s “Maniac Universe” and discusses the application of digital technologies in art.

Maniac Universe is a cosmic spectacle where the artist has used UV-A light to color the walls with a midnight blue shade (Fang, 2018). Large scroll-like works showing various familiar animals are installed across the walls in a linear procession. ‘Maniac Universe is a new painting which is about 40-meter long. It is done on a mulberry bark paper which is handmade and specially prepared for the artwork (Neutze, 2018). The painting fills the first-floor gallery of the MCA and immediately draws attention because of its size and luminous blue look.

Maniac Universe will take you into another universe and an alternative world that distances you from the reality. This is a universe where one looks at familiar objects and yet feels strange. The artist makes us think more in-depth about the ordinary things and exercise our imagination. The complexity of Sun’s work addresses the broadest possible audience and makes several points of universal relevance. The fragile material is painted with phosphorescent elements with glowing purple, white and ultraviolet lights (Neutze, 2018). The long painting is filled with oversized paintings of animals that look unusual when placed together. You find a horse, a chicken, bat, lobster and grasshopper that look very strange when pit together as stated by Neutze (2018). Those animals remind one of the Chinese zodiacs. Sun’s artworks are based on digital media are meticulously crafted and created.

The phosphorescent elements of the oversized paintings of animals glow white and purple and ultraviolet lights. It is unusual to see those familiar animals together in a single artwork and done with such details and intricacies.   Whether it is a horse, chicken, bat, lobster or the grasshopper, each of those creatures is done in large size and glare back at you from within their darkened bodies that contrast against the phosphorescent blue of the background. Whether it is the rooster feathers or the hairy antennae of the cockroach, one can find fluorescent lines give the detailed and intricate outlines. The rest of the space is taken by spherical blobs that look more like bubbles or planets in space.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia’s Sun Xun Exhibition

On closer inspection, the viewer realizes that he is now in an unfamiliar world and a darker alternative to the universe (Fang, 2018). The creatures on the walls replace the traditional Chinese zodiac animals and force the spectator on a journey with a new discovery and insight. Sun Xun wants his viewers to enter a parallel world and thinking about a parallel universe when they enter his solo exhibition in Australia (Maunder, 2018). He wants to create art for the future and not for the present. He uses a different element’s to put together a functional work of art that motivates people to gain perspective. The crazy bright work is filled with animals, planets and other objects that are all put together. The artwork leaves you intrigued because of the strangeness behind.

As asserted by Hansen (2012), although the world is three dimensional, throughout most of history, the humans have expressed it in two dimensions. Virtual reality creates a complete simulation of perceptual reality by projecting the images in three dimensions.  The use of digital media is finning an increased expression in deferent sectors, and art is one of them. Traditional manual production in art needs to make way for the optional use of media and encourage image production and communication with the use of digital media. Digital media in art no only contributes a change but makes the whole process of art a lot more interactive and communicative (Örtegren, 2012). Maniac Universe is a good example of how the artist uses digital technology to create new experiences.

Digital apparatuses abstract the visible, sensory and mental information. It makes a concrete abstraction of text, image, and sound to bring them together as a perceptual range. The digitally-fed interfaces enable complex telecommunications within the social environment of digital culture (Broeckmann, 2007). The ultimate aim of digital media is to create sensory experiences and transmit them directly from one consciousness to another. Today, the masses are well aware of the media displayed in public media spaces as billboard-sized screens. The digital media is challenging the status of older electronic and print media (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). The objective of digital media in art is to achieve immediacy through the act of mediation. The icons and graphics in multimedia applications play a dual role of expressions of the integration of text and image.

Sun Xun always carried interest in film making and storytelling but could not afford a camera for a long time. He used woodblock prints to create labor-intensive animations to narrate his stories. In an interview, he comments how he looks for innovative materials and new ways to create his art (Maunder, 2018). In a short video, Sun Xun comments how it is essential to ask who you are and where you are from. Those questions relate to history, and then he goes on to explain the labor-intensive process of how he makes his animation. Every single frame is handmade, and there can be up to 10 frames for one sec (Piguet, 2016).

Overview of Maniac Universe and its artwork

The new digital media oscillates between transparency and opacity and tries to create a more immediate experience. The viewer is aware of the art as well as the medium of its expression (Bolter & Grusin, 2000). For example, the Maniac Universe forces the viewers to enjoy the art as well as marvel as the digital side of its creation. The use of digital media here remediates the existing art to create a new display. The microcomputing revolution and massive increases in processing speeds allow a more expansive and fluid interpenetration of physical and virtual spaces (Hansen, 2012). The media artists are moving towards more sophisticated representations of three-dimensional simulations.

Hansen (2012) locks at the virtual reality as the desire for an unmediated union with the natural world. The mixed reality opens up the possibilities of the third realm of a functionalist “fantasy” through use of multiple senses. The digital media art and its apparatuses have perforated the aesthetic experiences. It is essential to understand how the digital aesthetics pivots on the technical facets of artistic production (Broeckmann, 2007). The concepts of contemporary and media art practice, in general, have evolved with time, taking on new roles, definitions, and functionalities. Maniac Universe animation is like an enormous painting that acts as a metaphor or analogy of a parallel world. The artworks make one feel that there is always more than one thing happening and more than one opinion in circulation (Maunder, 2018).

It is interesting to see how the digital new media has remediated the analog media forms such as books, photography, music, television, film, video and more. One can experience those forms via the new media of the digital world. People prefer digital consumption as it allows them to enjoy more choices, greater interaction, and entertainment (Kaul, 2012). Artists like Sun Xun create a new way of looking at the world and creates a parallel world with the technology.

References:

Broeckmann, A. (2007). Image, Process, Performance, Machine. Aspects of a Machinic Aesthetics, The MIT Press, 37(4), 193-205.

Bolter, J.D & Grusin, R. (2000). Introduction: the double logic of remediation. The MIT Press, 1(1), 21–50.

Fang, W. (2018). Sun Xun: Solo Exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, the artling Retrieved from https://theartling.com/en/artzine/2018/7/11/sun-xun/

Hansen, M.B.N. (2012). Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. Routledge, 1(1), 1–340.  

Kaul, V. (2012).Changing Paradigms of Media Landscape in the Digital Age. Journal of Mass Communication & Journalism, 1(1), 1–9.  

Maunder, T. (2018). Sun Xun in Conversation, Ocula Retrieved from https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/sun-xun-(1)/

MCA. (2018). Sun Xun, The Museum of Contemporary Art Retrieved from https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/sun-xun/

Neutze, B. (2018). The MCA has unveiled Sun Xun’s 40-metre painting, timeout Retrieved from https://www.timeout.com/sydney/news/the-mca-has-unveiled-sun-xuns-40-metre-painting-071418

Örtegren, H., (2012).The scope of digital image media in art education. Computers & Education, 59(2), 793-805.

Piguet, A. (2016). Art Basel Miami 2016 – “Reconstruction of the Universe” Behind the Scenes – Audemars Piguet, YouTube Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srKrzgY2rIE