Sun Xun
The animated film What Happened in Past Dragon Year (all works cited, 2014) was the centerpiece of Sun Xun’s recent exhibition “Brave New World.” It formed part of a sculptural installation—also depicted in a drawing titled Organism of Civilization—in which a taxidermied horse emerges out of the back of a flat screen supported on either side by a wooden totem, each with a rooster perched at the peak. Ten minutes in length, the animation opens with a series of quotes, which hover over scenes that were also presented in the gallery as grayscale pastels on canvas hung among other works on paper and canvas related to the film. Each canvas’s title includes the name of the source for one of the quotations in the animation—among them were Was Nikola Tesla a Communist?, Trotsky’s Religion, and Kafka’s Travels. The only title without the name of a historical figure was The Second Work of Spontaneous Generation. In the film, this canvas forms the background for the name of Aldous Huxley, whose 1932 dystopian novel lent the exhibition its title.
In this, the exhibition represented both a critical reflection and a somber prediction. As the artist wrote in a meticulously illustrated and annotated book presented as part of the show, also titled Brave New World (2014): “No matter how hard people try to create a new world, they always end up creating just a new facade.” To underscore the timelessness of such repetition, the book describes an imaginary year in which China’s political body splits to form the “Big Brother Party” (a name with obvious Orwellian references) and the “New World Party” (the name adopted recently by the Grand National Party in South Korea). Continuing the idea of a split but opening up the context to a global view, the script goes on to describe the situation in Ukraine as a conflict between the country’s East and West and between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, as much as between democracy and autocracy. “It is a strange world today when everything is about democracy,” the artist concludes at this point, recalling an earlier passage in the script. “Today everyone is pursuing a new world order in a global context.”
But, as Sun suggests, such new world orders are rarely new at all. This was reflected in the animation, from the flickering, which recalls that of old films, artificially imparted to various frames, to scenes that unfold against colored backdrops. Two such backdrops were also presented in the gallery, rendered roughly in ink on paper. One was Appreciated Scenery, 2014, which, in the film, provides the forest setting for a scene in which a man and woman rendered in the ukiyo-e style fuck in a forest, at times nervously, at points almost distractedly. The other was A Historic Moment, 2014, a landscape filled with giant skulls from which, in the film, an old, wheelchair-bound man in top hat and tails gazes longingly through binoculars. Other scenes in the film rendered in different styles include a theater filled with the muffled sound of an orchestra playing Mahler as a contemptuous audience tosses live chickens at the musicians; a man reading in his room as a rally, replete with large red flags, each emblazoned with hammer and sickle, takes place outside; and Presidents Clinton, Bush II, and Obama whispering and laughing, as if engaging in a private joke. In one fleeting shot, the caption in a magazine article describes the “Leviathan” of China’s state-owned enterprises as “overfed”—a reference to Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 book of the same name, on the cover of which the social contract is presented as an organism of civilization: the collective body in the form of a giant. Leviathan is a fitting term to consider for this exhibition, in which our brave new world is depicted as a heaving human heap.