Sun Yao: Self-Consistent is a series of paintings exhibited as an architectural, environmental installation that, among other things, expands the viewer’s static experience of art. Although the paintings are affixed to a wall, they incorporate the architecture in which they are presented and activate the exhibition space in ways that undermine its role as neutral catalyst for art viewing. One of the first instances of this occurs with the 0.10 exhibition held in Petrograd, Russia in 1915 – 1916. In that groundbreaking exhibition, Kazimir Malevich presented Black Square (1915), which was installed where the left and right edges of the painting were mounted to the respective walls that met at the corner. The viewer’s role is altered via this idiosyncratic installation in which individual works are part of a gestalt akin to gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. What further accentuates this in Sun Yao: Self-Consistent, are the individual paintings that are relatively equal in size and all titled Neverland – Landscape, and this deliberate uniformity is a formal and conceptual strategy and exhibition device. Both elements of the hyphenated titles allude to topographies: one refers to a genre of art and the natural world and the other is a mythical place and first appears in the Scottish writer J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Never Grew Up.
What is Sun Yao exploring in his use of an iconic play as foil for this new corpus of paintings? For Barrie’s play would become one of the most well-known fantasy novels and canonized into the Western collective consciousness. The story became ingrained in Western culture in ways that Barrie could have never envisioned it; it eventually became part of the Walt Disney characters that many children throughout the world have enjoyed. Barrie’s story dovetails on a boy named Peter who lives in an imaginative world of escape. One of the things that have been said about the concept of the story, is that it is somewhat existential as Peter was a boy who never wanted to grow up. This negation of adult responsibilities as well as questions of mortality and the arbitrariness of life were a subtext to the story. Other scholars have proposed that the nemesis of Peter Pan, which was the pirate Captain Hook, may have also been informed by the broader context in which the original play was written. In 1904, there was a series of maritime accidents including the sinking off the Scottish coast of the Danish ocean liner, the SS Norge. This horrific coastal disaster resulted in the loss of some 635 lives. Seafaring is intrinsic to Barrie’s play and subsequent Peter Pan stories, thus these cataclysmic events involving mass death within the context of ships and the sea, have been thought to have tangentially influenced Peter Pan, or The Boy Who never Grew Up.
Sun Yao explores the psychology of place, either real or mythical, as a way to comment on Landscape’s psycho-emotional effect on our psyche. We often think of flora and fauna as something that exists outside of ourselves, but we forget that we are born into the world of nature as much as culture. Anthropology proposes that many cultures throughout history did not see themselves separated from the natural world, consequently the notion that culture, which consists of all things created by humanity as well as ideas, norms, and customs that constitute any given society or community, reside in one epistemological sphere while the natural world is found in another. This differentiation has been seen to be generally illusory, regardless that we live in an epoch of the highest technological advancements; yet, therapists and others in the field of mental health have argued that alienation comes from the wide and widening gulf between humans and the natural world.
Sun Yao, however, offers interesting pictorial renderings as to humanity’s relationship to the real and mythical in this group of paintings. Executed in the artist’s signature style of large, expansive passages of color that sometimes border on the monochromatic, there is a visually poetic tension in Sun Yao’s paintings between the representational and the purely abstract. We look at Sun Yao’s paintings and slowly comes a recognition that their subject matter indeed is some type of landscape or environment that were familiar with, but at the same time, they are beyond our ability to fully identify them as actual locales. Their reminiscent uncanniness is subconscious as if they are some kind of Rorschach blot or stain. Psychologists utilize the Rorschach blot or stain, which is an indiscernible abstract form, by exhibiting it to a patient to chart their reaction towards it without them trying to figure out what they are looking at. The more immediate the response to the Rorschach stain that bypasses the conscious mind, the more possibility at arriving at the source of a patient’s internal conflict. Purely abstract works of any genre should also function in this manner. That is to say, that they should circumvent the conscious mind in order to produce a state akin to transcendence, for it is not enough for non-representational art to be only an aesthetic experience. In the case of Wasily Kandinsky’s Composition IV of 1914, for example, which art historians consider to be the first purely abstract painting, the artist attempted to render a spiritual vision that would translate to the viewer via the mode of non-representational art. Whether or not Sun Yao aspires to this in his paintings is beside the point, but it is apparent that the works affect the viewer beyond that of just a purely formalist, aesthetic encounter. On the other hand, if one takes the opposite philosophical position of spirituality or metaphysics, that is to say, materialism and science, Sun Yao’s Neverland – Landscape paintings may be seen as artistic explorations of the most ostensibly unbelievable ideas at the frontiers of theoretical physics about emptiness and the void existing throughout the cosmos. But emptiness and the void are not referred to as an absent presence, but rather as some form of intangibility or of what is referred to in scientific parlance as Dark Matter. And it is here where Sun Yao’s paintings aptly embody their titles.
The Neverland – Landscape paintings have a tendency to morph or even shift before our eyes, they ostensibly cohere in our visual field as some kind of environments that teeter on recognizability though subliminally strange. Sun Yao achieves this through an eclectic array of artistic techniques and formal strategies that are historical and contemporaneous at the same time. By working in a limited palette that could be referred to as monochromatic, there is a linking of Sun Yao’s aesthetic to Modernist Abstract-Expressionists such as Barnett Newman and the Color Field painters including Mark Rothko or even Kenneth Noland. The indubitable visual presence of Sun Yao’s hues is also intensified by the diversity of his confident execution of paint. Mark-making, for Sun Yao, entails a broad purview of qualities including dense brushwork in counterpoint to more washed out passages that are opaque and seemingly reflect light as well as absorb it. Some works are variations of black inflected with white and this creates an active surface. Simultaneously the illusionistic surface gives way to a fathomless depth. Sun Yao leads us into a kind dark matter of painting akin to the mysterious, universal void we inhabit. This overpowering presence of the paintings are not only enhanced by their size, but more so by the enigmatic quality of the negative space that becomes positive component in his designs. By being dominated by dark colors in which white is used in subordination to them, Sun Yao seems to invert the conventions of traditional rules of chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro, or the interplay of light and dark via black and white to create three-dimensionality in a painting is reversed: in the historical application of chiaroscuro, white is dominate and black is sparingly use in order to highlight shadow in a composition. Sun Yao works the other way around in having dark colors become the central color in his designs. There is also something to be said in how Sun Yao reworks tenebrism as well. Tenebrism is the heir of chiaroscuro and was one of the formal devices associated with the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s dramatic, Baroque paintings were known for his amazing use of Tenebrism, and a similar quality is found in Sun Yao’s Neverland – Landscape paintings. Not only does the dialectic between light and dark heighten the energetic quality of Sun Yao’s paintings, but coupled with their monumentality they have an enveloping effect on the viewer as well. Most of the Neverland – Landscape paintings measure some 200 × 400 cm, and this creates a relationship between the viewer in which the viewer is subordinate to them.
The paintings are strategically installed next to each other in Sun Yao: Self-Consistent, but in a way that wraps around the exhibition space and consequently the viewer. The viewer is not only engulfed by the paintings where there is no median point in the installation configuration thus creating an expansive artistic environment, but experiencing them entails the body as well as the eye, or the corporeal as well as the optical. When one enters the exhibition space one is surrounded by paintings thus it’s futile to try to locate a sense of a beginning, middle, or end. This was a feature of some of the large-scale paintings in the past, most notably among them being Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (1950). While Sun Yao’s paintings evoke landscapes, they also transport us to some other world in which figuration and pure abstraction poetically push and pull towards and away from each other. There have been, however, other painters alluding to the idiosyncratic exhibition installation as far back as Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (1914 – 1926) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Andy Warhol’s Shadows (1978 – 1979) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Neverland – Landscape paintings differ from Monet and Warhol in that they are also responding to forms of visual culture that were either in their genesis or completely absent, like cinema was to Monet and media art, the Internet, and virtual space were to Warhol. Sun Yao’s Neverland – Landscape corpus is an immersive artistic experience that is cinematic because one is surrounded by paintings similar to how one sees a large film projected on a screen. One feels completely enveloped when one enters the exhibition space. Being surrounded by paintings that are next to each other in one continuum is similar to digitized virtual space. Ironically, Sun Yao alludes to the media of cinema and virtual space which have been often construed as counter to the medium of painting.
Sun Yao: Self-Consistent and the Neverland – Landscape works reminds us with visual deftness how painting continues to respond to and influenced by, myriad forms of visual culture both historically and contemporaneously. The exhibition ostensibly incorporates installation and architecture in its presentation and points to ever new possibilities between art and its experience. And as the works contain within them make quite clear, the artist Sun Yao continues to explore and innovatively expand the boundaries of what painting can be today.