Sun Yao was born in Shanghai in 1974. He graduated from China Academy of Art with a BA in 1998, from Fine Arts College of Shanghai University with an MFA in 2001, and graduated from China Academy of Art with a PhD in 2012. He is currently an associate professor at Shanghai University.

The enigmatic space travel and sci-fi stories from childhood memories, the portraits of every emotion in films, newsreels and archives have always fascinated Sun Yao, who is deeply influenced by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty’s existentialism. Nebulae, black holes, flares, waves, islands, forests, tendons, nerves and faces manifest and drift away in Sun’s works. The magnificence embedded inside micro-organism, the momentum surged in a glimpse, the visible hidden in the invisible, as they co-exist and intertwine. From the earlier works of “Body”, “Face”, to “Eternity” and “Universe” series in the moment, the artist consistently explores and reflects as an explorer on existence, nature and the unknown, to go beyond the infinity and transcendence.

In his artistic exploration of twenty years, Sun has been consistently studying and experimenting on the life structure inspired by Baroque and its related painting elements including brushstroke, texture and quality. Using fingers, wiping cloth, washing oil, special-formed scraping tools and brushes to form body curves, Sun develops his unique “classical abstract” art style. Julian Stallbrass, the British art historian, stated in his article Into the Woods: Sun Yao’s Animist Realm: “Sun Yao, who has written of rebirth, and indeed of establishing his own personal Renaissance, is rather an artist of addition, snatching the bodies from the sacrificial pyre, and bringing back what was lost in the process of subtraction and purification.”

His works are collected by a number of institutions, including Aurora Group, PowerLong Group, Yanlord Land Group, Guangda Group, Nongfu Spring, Keboda, HOW Art Museum, Fudan University, Savannah College of Art and Design, The Royal House of Norway, Rothschild Family, and many private art collectors.

Sun Yao has held exhibitions with many prominent institutions at home and abroad including China Art Museum (Shanghai), Shanghai Art Museum (Shanghai), SPSI Art Museum (Shanghai), Long Museum (Shanghai), Aurora Museum (Shanghai), PowerLong Art Museum (Shanghai), Beijing Times Art Museum (Beijing), Art Museum of China Academy of Art (Hangzhou), QU Art Museum (Suzhou), Vanities Gallery (Paris), Galerie Shanghai (Munich), Konfuzius-Institut Nürnberg-Erlangen (Nürnberg), Art Museum St-Urban (Lucerne); ART021 (Shanghai), ART TAIPEI (Taipei), LA Art Show (Los Angeles), VOLTA Art Fair (Basel), SCOPE Art Fair (New York, London), PULSE Art Fair (Miami Beach, New York), ARTMUC (Munich), Abu Dhabi Art (Abu Dhabi), Art Fair Tokyo (Tokyo), Art Stage (Singapore), etc.

In 2009, Sun Yao was invited by the Norwegian Embassy in China to visit Norway, and created Trace of Aurora for the Norwegian Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, which received widespread attention at home and abroad. Journey of Discovery, a CCTV programme, produced a special feature titled ‘Chasing the Invisible Sun’.