Sun Xun's artistic mission to put Chinese history in perspective
Sun Xun's ink art and animations tackle the big questions about the official and personal accounts of the Chinese experience, writes Barbara Pollack
When artist Sun Xun was growing up in Fuxin, a small city in Liaoning province near the North Korean border, he knew China had at least two histories.
In school, he studied Chinese history as presented in official accounts, a version free of such troubling episodes as the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution.
Most people look at history like a performance on a stage. They don't look behind the curtains to see what is really happening
At home, his father would give him a more personal account, describing what had happened to his family during the 1960s and '70s, when his grandmother was marched into a public square, forced to wear a dunce cap, and declaimed as a bourgeois collaborator for her upper-class background.
Today, Sun is obsessed with Chinese history as it is recounted and manipulated in museum exhibitions and books, and as it is recalled by its participants. He examines it through ink art, an inherited tradition, making installations and video animations from thousands of meticulously drawn frames. They often feature a political leader in the guise of a magician, "the only legal liar", according to Sun.
He takes inspiration from political cartoons, biology books, instruction manuals and newsreels, yet like many Chinese artists of his generation - he was born in 1980 - he avoids didactic conclusions about the government, preferring to couch his criticisms in surreal metaphors. Often animals and insects stand in for human emotions, and conflicts and weapons punctuate scenes fraught with paranoia.
