Sun Yao’s art probes the incommensurable, whether it be the infinitesimally small or the cosmic infinity. The artist’s coherent process, articulated within expansive series, allows him to confront questions such as the discovery of the universe and human mortality. Take his titles as a cue (Landscapes, To The Stars, Oblivion, Deep Forest, Neverland). These provide an entry point to understand his painterly enquiry and its relation to the history of art. The representation of space and material, and what lies beyond what the eye can see, has for centuries been at the centre of artistic endeavours. These challenges have led to pictorial experimentations and breakthroughs. Whether embarking on a spiritual quest or driven by visual and other sensorial experiences, artists as far ranging as Wassily Kandinsky and Yayoi Kusama have sought inspiration from man’s relation to space and temporality.
As a boy Sun Yao was fascinated with space travel and the sci-fi films it inspired. The disintegration in 1986, when the artist was 12 years old, of a Challenger space shuttle soon after its take off left a lasting impression on him. One of the most mediatised accidents involving a spacecraft, it tragically sapped the heroic aspiration to master the universe that first developed in a context of Cold War confrontation. Perhaps it is this lingering childhood memory that imbues Sun Yao’s space-inspired paintings with an uncertain dimension. Take To The Stars No. 21 (2016) as an example. The diptych consists of an array of white particles that together make up sweeping shafts of light. These emerge against a dark background. Sun Yao details material elements that seem physically inaccessible. The painting resembles a foray into the unknown. One may wonder if the fine-grained observations render earthy or cosmic dust clouds. Like other of the artist’s paintings, it results in a disorienting effect.
Sun Yao often uses photographs collected over time as visual sources; cloud formations, the surface of the earth, cosmic nebulae and the natural world seen under a microscope, as well as x-ray imaging of the human body form part of his references. Some of these images are reworked on a computer screen before serving as visual aids for Sun Yao’s works. In the case of paintings from the series To The Stars, they seem to be rendering the infinity of the universe. Articulating myriad clusters and constellations, they can be compared to images taken by space telescopes which have changed our perception of the universe. As scientists offer ever more complex revelations, their discoveries materialize for the neophytes as mere images gleaned from computer screens. The Hubble space telescope, launched into the low earth orbit in 1990, and more recently the James Webb space telescope launched in 2021 have been capturing deep field images that reveal distant galaxies. Their pictures of space trigger wonder and marvel. They confront the viewer with the beauty that lies beyond the earth; stars and galaxies whose light took billions of years to reach us. Verging on the sublime, the colourized telescope images are profoundly attractive, but also overwhelming. Their effect is at once electrifying and deeply humbling. What they depict is incomprehensible.
The history of European painting, including many works with mystical and Biblical themes, is another major source of inspiration. Steeped in his study of Western painting and his training at the China Academy of Art, Sun Yao often resorts to historical artworks. Consider as an example the work Deep Forest No.27 (2012). It captures the primeval nature of the forest and is indebted to German painting, including Romantic works and those by masters of the early Renaissance. Here, a light transfixes the thickness of the forest and throws its reflection on the ground in a composition that is akin to that of his Romantic inspirations. But contrary to these references, there is no sense of depth or European construction of perspective. Sun Yao explains, that his landscapes deliberately lack “either the infinite aspiration to transcend the reality with this created space, or God’s gaze upon man, as embodied in nature, in Albrecht Aldorfer’s work. In Deep Forest there is an uncertain zone”, he continues, “and a dimension composed of memories about time… It is this very absence that enables me to base my quest on a route other than one decided by linear thinking”.
The Deep Forest series began while Sun Yao was studying at the China Academy of Art and was finished just a year after the artist completed his doctorate at the academy in 2012. Yet it already bares the hallmarks of Sun Yao’s work. His expressive gesture suggests rather than describes his subject matter. The painting’s emerald green moving into layers of viridian and pine green alludes to the moss and fern that lay below the imposing trees. The composition conjures tree trunks, branches and the dense bark of a majestic tree. Yet, like in other paintings of the series, there is only an ambient arrangement of indiscernible visual elements. This is not an immutable idealized landscape, skilfully recreated in its minute details as in the works of the aforementioned painters, but a forest caught in a transient state.
Given the dramatic dwindling of old-growth, or “virgin”, forests and the extractive relationship that man has developed with these ecosystems, the Deep Forest series also offers a darker reading. In the black and white canvas Deep Forest No.14 a naked woman seems caught in the forest. This ghostly presence instils a feeling of anxiety. The smaller canvases of the series, including Deep Forest No.11 (2010), reveal an imposing nature contained in an intimate size. Worked in white and in black paint, merged into different shades of grey, its precision recalls the forest landscapes that appear in the works on paper by Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer. These often serve as backdrops for mystical creatures and monsters, as well as the morality tales of saints and heroes. But an environmental slant seems equally valid in the twenty-first century.
Turning to his working method, the tension between the aggregate nature of painting and the assertive gesture inflicted on the canvas is revealing of Sun Yao’s process. There is a deliberate intensity in his gesture and at times a voluntary coarseness to his surfaces. From it derives the opaqueness of his paintings. Sun Yao often handles the gravity of paint by moving his tools across the surface in a vigorously assertive way. He explains that he achieves his paint strokes by using palette knives, scraping blades and a range of brushes and rags. Consider the diptych To The Stars No.16 (2015), thickly impastoed waves move across the surface. The white foam gives its vibrancy to the painting, the scale of which is difficult to assess. Like in many of Sun Yao’s canvases there is a destabilising sense of depth at play. Even on close inspection it is unclear if his layered process renders the near or the far and which scales of magnitude he is handling. Tellingly, the series To The Stars was partly inspired by x-ray images he saw after he ruptured his Achilles tendon. The piercing effect of x-ray imagery, created by the different ways in which light is absorbed by the body, prompted this series.
In his play with light and texture, Sun Yao seems to dissolve rather than build up an image. His atmospheric paintings, such as Trace No.28, Deep Forest No.20 or Landscape of Face No.8, allow the raised areas of the surface to capture light. He explains that midway during the making of a painting he usually pours large quantities of turpentine onto the canvas to help dilute the pigments. He then places the canvas on the ground to better gauge the surface texture and the way the composition is developing. Of his play with light, he states that “especially in some light-coloured parts of the picture, I intentionally choose dark diluted pigments to pour and cover, allowing the dark pigment to sink into the grooves of the light-coloured picture, forming a strong light and shadow effect, and making the originally flat colour layer suddenly rich in three-dimensional sense and texture”.
Sun Yao’s tormented landscapes, oscillating between the figurative and the abstract, beg questions on the narratives and emotions that lie behind them. They seem to capture human solitude and express a sense of angst and alienation that derives from it. A feeling of uncertainty has indeed taken hold of the artist’s life and art in recent years. He shares that his father was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer towards the beginning of 2017, while his eldest uncle was diagnosed with gastric cancer at roughly the same time. His grandparents too suffered from cancer around the same age as his father and uncle, while another uncle died young of liver cancer. This family tragedy, and the impression of looking at his own future, imbues a sense of doom to his art. But it is also a source of perseverance. In reaction, “I began to paint storms and swaying islands; as if great turbulence and restlessness without a place were the truth of life”, he explains.
Using another painterly reference, Sun Yao mentions that seeing his father in hospital recalled to him Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famed The Procession to Calvary (1564). The painting vividly renders the indifference of crowds in front of the suffering of Christ. However, the art historical sources that form Sun Yao’s memory structure do not necessarily manifest in his work. Although he has included portraits in some of his compositions (for example in the earlier series Landscape of Face, 2007), his own painting has remained close to abstraction. To cope with the pain and physical transformation that his father was undergoing, Sun Yao began to paint storms and islands rattled by wind; “as if great turbulence and restlessness without a place were the truth of life”, he states. Addressing his own mortality he says that, “like my father, I will eventually slide to the end of my life and sunken as the majority”.
A year after his father falling ill, he embarked on a series titled Neverland. The fabled island referred to here is that of J. M. Barrie. Inspired by the death of the author’s teenage brother and his having to live in his shadow, it is a place far darker than that dreamed up by Walt Disney studios, in which Peter Pan and many of its other residents refuse to grow old. Over time it has been associated with immortality. In Sun Yao’s Neverland – Surging the Night No.1 (2018) vertical lines of white paint create a screen-like effect. As they disrupt the canvas, the white streaks seem to erase rather than build up the surface. While other works of the series do not share the same dark tone, the deceptive lure of the original Neverland island is never too far away.
In contrast, a far more elated mood undergirds the Skyline series (2020–2021). Created during the extended lockdown that marked Shanghai, when Sun Yao was living in the confines of his studio space, the series offers an entry into the artist’s life during COVID 19. The painter explains that he has regularly had to change studios since 2015. He moved into his current studio shortly before the COVID pandemic began. Working on an upper floor of a Shanghai building offering a view on the sea, the skyline served as an inspiration. In addition to the imposed lockdown, the constraints of COVID, and especially the difficulties faced in sourcing material, meant that Sun Yao had to resort for a while to small 40×50 cm canvases. He even had to repaint on some draft paintings. Yet the resulting works are surprisingly colourful. Using a joyful palette, the series evokes the necessity to escape, emotionally if not physically, during the pandemic. It offers dream-like scenes in evanescent light constructed from the vibrant seductive colours of sunsets and with titles referring to distant green mountains and valleys.
Obtaining a similar sense of enclosure to that experienced during the pandemic, on several occasions displays of Sun Yao’s work have sought to create immersive environments that engulf the viewer. The serial nature of Sun Yao’s work, with individual paintings often worked in diptychs, is further exacerbated when canvases are displayed in a contiguous manner. Presented in such way, Sun Yao’s paintings create a wrap-up effect. It is commonly done to remark upon the tension between the uniqueness of painting and the seriality of abstraction. Some artists have dealt with it by reverting to hallucinatory effects or to chance procedures. In the case of Sun Yao’s captive images his quest ultimately bears the promise of visual and personal resolution.