Smoke spectres and neon gods: Sun Xun and Stories that animate us conjure wild imaginary worlds at the VAG
The celebrated Chinese artist unfurls a room-filling scroll, while Howie Tsui draws with lit matches
Details from Sun Xun’s Mythology or Rebellious Bone at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist and ShanghART Gallery
The Vancouver Art Gallery presents Sun Xun: Mythology of Time and Stories that animate us until August 22. See COVID-19 safety protocols here
FANTASTICAL DRAGONS, multiheaded gods, and ghostly apparitions vie for attention in two spellbinding new exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Celebrated Chinese artist Sun Xun sees his first solo show in Canada, the fantastical but rooted-in-current-events Mythological Time. The group show Stories that animate us responds to and complements that exhibit with a diverse array of animation and drawings.
Vancouver-based artist Howie Tsui sets the mood for all of it in the gallery’s rotunda. Created by soaking paint and ink through rice paper then “drawing” on it with smoke, his apparitions and demons seem to emerge from some other world on the gallery walls.
The site-specific installation, part of a series called “Spectral Residue”, draws inspiration from everything from Hong Kong vampire films to Ming dynasty paintings, comic books, and street art.
Tsui, who Stir caught up with as he was finishing the work, says the process he uses to make the images is highly allegorical. (He’s employed it elsewhere, most recently at the Power Plant in Toronto.) For each of the figures, he’s pressed and soaked the images through the rice paper onto the walls, then discarded the paper afterwards.
“The paper is like a corpse and the spirit has transferred to the wall,” he explains, standing surrounded by the bloodlike drips of calligraphy ink and acrylic paint along the rotunda’s baseboards, hundreds of long, burned-down matches littering the floor.
“When they were like, ‘Do you want to do the rotunda?’ I got a little nervous,” he adds with a laugh, explaining ventilation and other factors make the smoke imagery tough to control.
Howie Tsui’s wall drawings from the “Spectral Residue” series, 2020 (details of installation at The Power Plant). Photos by Toni Hafkensheid
Like so much other work in the exhibit that follows, his eerie images carry deeper messages. Tsui says he’s asking questions about officialdom (look for the amorphous forms of two Qing dynasty guards over the rotunda door) and about how fear is used as a form of social control. In wall panels for two other pieces that sit inside the Stories that animate us exhibit, he also talks about how “monstrosity and the grotesque represent a hole in the order of things” and how they can represent “the threatening ‘other’”.
But the artist, who works across media as diverse as painted scrolls and animated projections, also attributes a lot of his horror imagery to being born in Hong Kong. “Hong Kong is a super-superstitious place and I just convey that part of my background,” he says. “Hong Kong was a safe place to get freaky.”
Tsui’s ghostly figures are the perfect prelude to Sun Xun’s stunning installation—storytelling imagery that also draws on Asian tradition. Based in Beijing, the fast-rising young artist founded the Pi Animation studio, and incorporates painting, woodcuts, traditional Chinese ink, and charcoal drawings into his animated works.
The big draw here is the chance to see the Chinese artist’s dazzling animated work Mythological Time—and it more than lives up to the buzz created when it debuted at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2016. (It now sits in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, a gift of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in connection with The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative.) For this installation, Sun has also provided a handpainted, black-and-white frame for the projection.
Playing across a long, scroll-like panorama, Mythological Time travels through the history of his hometown, the coal-mining centre of Fuxin—once the pride of industrialized China. Sun travelled back to the city to draw its street- and landscapes, but he also conjures a strange, shape-shifting world that weaves in social events, revolution, and fantastical elements. Imaginary creatures morph into massive social monuments; crows fly out of a man’s chest; tanks and war planes appear; and spectres rise over an apocalyptic landscape. The central story tracks the depletion of the town’s economic lifeblood, overmining transforming a once fertile landscape into one of postindustrial bleakness.
The video sits across the room from a massive, 31-foot-long rice-and-mulberry-paper-scroll painting that Sun has created specifically for this show. Called Mythology or Rebellious Bone, it is a sequel to his video, VAG interim chief curator Diana Freundl says.
A scene from Sun Xun’s Mythological Time, on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
It is a marvel—a mashup of Yokai-style ghosts, traditional Chinese ink painting, neon colours, gold leaf, cartoon, and modified eastern monsters and deities dancing across the gorgeously textured traditional paper. Eight-headed beasts, a pouncing tiger with eyelashes, and a dragon that recalls Cheng Rong’s 13th-century Nine Dragons painting create a fantastical world.
“He calls them ‘fake gods,’” Freundl says of some of the more recognizable figures, such as a Buddha-like character who’s riding an elephant.
But don’t be mistaken: Sun’s imaginary figures speak directly to urgent real-life issues. “He’s interested in how, right now, we see a return to more fundamentalism and nationalism across the world, and multiple ideologies are being used for that,” Freundl says. Sun has conjured a land after time—when humans seem to have disappeared.
The title itself is a clue to the provocative themes in the work: the “rebellious bone” comes from a Chinese legend about a literal bone in the back of the neck that gave an emperor’s advisor his defiant strength, Freundl relates.
Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo’s Santo Marero, 2020, courtesy of the artist
A similar mix of serious real-life themes and artful fantasy play out in animated installations and drawings throughout the Stories that animate us show. A standout is the haunting mix of black-and-white imagery with surreal touches in drawings by Salvadoran-born Vancouver-based artist Osvaldo Ramirez Castillo. Processing memories of his homeland’s violent past, his work calls to mind tattoo art and Latin American Catholic iconography, with surreal Dali-esque touches. In one image, a black-and-white torso’s arms hold a machine gun, one hand severed and pink roses sprouting out of a shirt neck in place of a head.
And don’t miss Vancouver Michif stop-motion animator Amanda Strong’s haunting animated Flood, with one of its miniature classroom sets, complete with piles of paper toppling over, and a lone girl sitting at a desk in front of a blackboard that announces “History 101”. Elsewhere look for work by artists as diverse as Vancouver animator Cindy Mochizuki, printmaking master Francisco de Goya, and the Royal Art Lodge.
Befitting the exhibition title, many fascinating, multilayered stories unfold here, so set aside the proper time to take them all in. It’s a good way to escape your pandemic lockdown and lose yourself in other worlds. You can book a visit ahead of time; safety protocols and distancing are in place. The only thing to worry about here are the ghosts and monsters.
Related Articles
