DSL Magazine: Issue 6

Sun Xun, The Shock of Time, 2006, installation, multi-media, 300 x 600 cm Courtesy of dslcollection Hybridity gives definitively birth to an original aesthetic language. Sun Xun (b.1980) creates animation videos made from woodcuts, colour powder and traditional ink that blend western and eastern styles. His universe is a dark one, burdened with anxiety. It is the world of lies, of black chimney smoke emanating from factories, which darken the sky and hide the sun from sight. An atmosphere much like the one in George Orwell’s novels. The Shock of Time , for instance, includes 150 small paintings and drawings on old Chinese newspapers and books. The artist borrows the Western surrealist style to draw his black figures, which then melt with the background, mixing Dali’s aesthetics with the People’s Liberation Army Pictorial. Inspired by Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World , the work entitled What happen in the year of the dragon (2014) is an animation screened between two pillars topped with a stuffed hen and presented in front of a brown horse’s rump. His surrealistic images and drawings reflect and condemn the way how the fictional and tragic future described in Huxley’s text has become a reality: a society controlled by a totalitarian government through the use of science and technology.