“I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still.” (Peter and Wendy, By J.M. Barrie, 1911)
Sun Yao was born in Shanghai in 1974. A year before I was, in fact. He graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts with a BA in oil painting in 1998, the same year that I graduated. He went on to get his MFA, and then, in 2012, a Ph.D. which was coincidentally the year in which I first came to Shanghai. While I was raised on the beach in New Zealand, Sun grew up in Pudong, on the east side of the Huangpu river. The river is, in fact, a canal over one hundred kilometres long, carved into the land more than two thousands years ago under the direction of Lord Chushen, a renowned scholar and government official. The meandering waterway is named for his birth name, Huang, although few remember. Along with the Chaoyang river, it connects the Yangtze in the north to Hangzhou Bay in the south, technically making Pudong an island, exiled by a 400 metre stretch of muddy water, swirling with mystery, bones, and forgotten stories. Shanghai is a coastal city, although for someone coming from a country where you’re never more than thirty minutes from the shore, it often feels as if the city, perhaps due to its history of occupation and sadness, has turned its back on the coast and instead pays all its attention on the river.
People say that you can never step in the same river twice; Sun’s paintings strike me as like rivers, and not just in the way that they resemble seascapes, or liquid studies, but in the way that one can look at the same painting and not see the same thing twice. Nothing stands still.
We who are from the islands tend to think about the ocean rather differently from our friends on the continent, many of whom might only dream of seeing such a vast and, to them, vacant span. Continental thinkers tend to speak of it in uninhabited similes: like a desert, as dark and sparkling as the clear night sky. Like a swatch of cloth. They look for a loose thread to pull at, to unravel it so that, pulled into smaller pieces, it becomes simpler to finger and able to be examined close up to the eye. Without unravelling, the ocean seems to them insurmountable. Continental thinkers tend to find the ocean frightening and mysterious. Dreamlike.
Islanders, on the other hand, who live besides, and on, the ocean; who depend on it for their living, think of it in more practical terms, as a food basket, teeming and plentiful; as a highway, the stars our map. We tend not to view it in isolation, our universe consists of the land, the ocean, the underworld, and the heavens as one macroscopic whole as far as we could traverse it; as a swatch of cloth, it lays behind and before us, above and below, as a whole. If I could make an observation about his paintings, it is that Sun’s work encompasses both the perspective of the continental and the islander, examining both the weft of the cloth as well as the warp of the whole – or, put another way, in looking at the smallest thing, one discovers worlds.
Looking at his work creates a kind of frustration in me, and I don’t mean this in a negative sense, on the contrary. I have the same feeling when I am looking at just one small part of the puzzle, aware that I am missing the bigger picture, if my gaze were only able to widen so far. It is the sense one has when watching a murder mystery, and a crucial clue evades your reason. It is the type of frustration borne of coming up against ones limitations of comprehension. It is the same frustration that one feels when sat in the cinema, and one’s eyes are darting from one side of the screen to the other, biologically incapable of taking in the whole. As large as his canvases tend to be, I’m always left with the feeling that actually, each is but a part of a much larger project, which, at some yet indeterminate date, will reveal itself, and I can’t be sure that even Sun knows precisely what will be revealed. Artists sometimes talk of themselves as conduits, or tools, through which the art speaks, or, is revealed. Sun has talked in similar terms, “when I was painting, I would enter a state of ecstasy… it can be regarded as a kind of meditation in motion…”. There is a motion to every image, of course our eyes are drawn to the centre, and to the brightest parts, and so, when stood in front of a canvas, River of Entropy 201602, for example, one is aware of the direction and the stress in the application of the brushstrokes, but one can also imagine the state of being of the artist, the musicality of action.
Cinematic terms are not unreasonably deployed. The canvases tend towards exaggeration, so that when I stand in front of them, they fill the eye, much as a screen. Looking back across his earlier works, however, for the most part their ratio has been more approximate to the kind of old TV set that Sun and I might recall from our childhoods, perhaps. In recent years, their proportions are widening, taking on letterbox proportions. The canvases that make up his mammoth 41.2-metre long Neverland – Landscape, for example. Individually, they recall intimate theatres of the mind; together, they take on the appearance of a film strip, accidentally exposed, the nascent images stripped, leaving little but impressions. The series was, in part, influenced by his father’s illness, which, in 2018, precipitated a visit to the intensive care ward of the hospital. Coincidentally, in that year, I was diagnosed with cancer, and so frequent visits to the hospital became commonplace. I understand all too well the muscle-sense and the gritted-teeth-ness of the places, and as a patient and also a fellow artist, I feel some of what father and son would feel. Hospitals are islands; Neverlands. They lie quiet until you approach them, like beasts.
In the hospital, he witnessed the pain, despair, and the fright of his father’s fellow patients, the frantic and hurried atmosphere of the place. Anyone familiar with hospitals, as I am, will be familiar with the extraordinary balance between peace and chaos, gratitude and violence. They are, after all, places where the scared and the desperate go unwillingly, in search of kind words and categorical hope, and more often than not take to a bed with neither. They have a particular sound, like hundreds of people trying to be quiet, like the distant thunder at Calvary, which was said to split the earth. The hospital scene reminded Sun of The Procession to Calvary, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It was his largest painting, that is, until another was reattributed to him ten or so years ago. No doubt the scale as well as the scene appealed. In it, Christ and the thieves who are to be crucified beside him, are cajoled and compelled towards the mount of Golgotha, where they will be slain. The thieves are driven in a cart, where they wail and gnash, while Christ is almost hidden amongst the crowds. The painting, as the scene usually depicts, is not focussed on their torment so much as two other contrasts: the grief of the three women in the foreground, and the merriment of the crowds. Each of the women endure their own private agony, the Virgin alone seems to have collapsed in a mixture of nervous exhaustion and ennui, which John little knows how to console. The two other women are wrapped up in their own self comfort, and one can only imagine their inner words. Meanwhile, the distant crowds behind them cavort and flock towards the mountain amongst a landscape of gallows; dogs dance and children leap in the puddles, while pedlars and thieves prey on the stragglers. The whole thing around has a carnival air. Bruegel spares no time for sentiment here, death happens all the time, but life goes on, he makes clear.
There is another message here: while the stations of the cross typically exult in the suffering of Christ and His sacrifice for man, Bruegel’s placement of the women reminds us that the agony of death is most acutely felt by those who are left behind.
Coincidentally, perhaps, Bruegel’s theatre of life and death later became a film, The Mill and the Cross. Neverland – Landscape picks up all these threads and winds them out across 41.2 metres of black and white stop motion. Some might look at these paintings and not see any of this – the father, the hospital, the road to Calvary; Mary collapsed, exhausted beyond care. But they’re not meant to see. At least that’s what I think. I think it’s more about muscle memory. Before we had writing, people would hand down our history and our genealogy through art and language, and sometimes language was buried in our art. Abstract patterns, repeated, so that when one ran their hand over them, it created a muscle memory. We would tell our stories as our fingers ran over these patterns, each notch becoming a new chapter. I imagine that the canvases are a memetic device, and two things happen at the surface level: firstly, a viewer follows the patterns of light and darkness around the space, eyes follow feet, and certain associations spring to mind. Whatever these are, they are private things and particular to them. Secondly, the artist does the same, and as he follows the lines of light and dark, like following braille with a finger, he recalls a story. The muscle memory of making those marks activates the memories of the thoughts he once had as he made them, much like a needle following a groove in wax produces the sound from sometime when.
I look at Sun Yao’s paintings, and I see an act of memory.
It’s not the first time that the crucifixion has featured. Neverland No.1 grew out of a fascination with Rembrandt’s The Three Crosses. While in this instance Christ assumes the central space at the point of the apex formed by the thieves, and the grief stricken family appear, at least in outline, the show is nevertheless stolen by the figures of two men in the foreground, soldiers perhaps, who seem to have tired of the spectacle and are leaving in search of a place to eat. Death happens all the time, but life goes on. It bears repeating, because, in my opinion, it says something about the artist’s attitude.
Of course, just because he put Rembrandt there and then erased him doesn’t mean I see it, or you see it – or that we are meant to see it. I see the form of H.R. Giger’s Alien. Coincidentally, Sun Yao once spoke of the artistic process, of inspiration being like a creature who borrows the artist for a time, the work “in a sense, a familiar alien born from the artist’s body.” Ecstasy, from the Greek ecstasies, means literally, to stand outside oneself.
Comparison has been made to the psychological Rorschach pattern, and there may be some merit in that, insofar as many of the works are associative, the result of an erasure of another image: Neverland No.25 erases Rembrandt. Traces No.11 erases a film still from Godard’s Breathless. Neverland – Diana Resting reduces François Boucher’s figure of Diana to a constellation of gay tones. Like a Rorschach test, they deliberately shepherd us to a nearby conclusion. Diana, of course, is the huntress. She is connected to the moon, which, as it waxes and wanes, represents life and death. Her lively, fresh nudity contrasts with the felled game at her feet. Death happens, life goes on.
Pareidolia is the phenomenon by which we perceive images within random stimuli, and it is tempting to assume that it is this function that compels one to grasp for associations, even if they might not be there. Abstraction, by its nature, encourages pareidolia in a viewer. Michelangelo wrote about seeing figures in the stone, which, in part, is how he selected his rocks, and also how he decided on the subjects which he carved. Those of us who work and live in the arts are therefore just as likely to make associations, not just of figures and creatures, but of the work of other artists. Associations rise and collapse like waves on the shore of an island, a tidal river. Turner, Auerbach, Malevich. I see the cloud studies of J.C. Dahl, a Norwegian romantic (it is entirely possible that Sun is familiar with Dahl, as he could have come across his work when he visited Norway in 2009); Monet’s London, Parliament: Sun Breaking through The Fog (1904); Wolfgang Tillman’s The State We’re in (2015); the seascapes of Thierry De Cordier. I’m also reminded of the children in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, pushing their way through layers of fur coats in the closet until they feel their breath frosting and see snow on the floor. I feel a similar process in train when standing before one of Sun’s paintings, pushing through the layers of paint to expose certain natural things. It’s like he has laid something down and then covered it in dirt. Painting as an act of burial. As an act of forgetting.
“Feeling that Peter was on his way back, the Neverland had again woke into life… In his absence things are usually quiet on the island… if you put your ear to the ground now, you would hear the whole island seething with life.” (Peter and Wendy, By J.M. Barrie, 1911)
Consider Plato’s allegory of the cave. Prisoners are shackled to the low wall of a cave, unable to move or turn their heads, or even look down at their own bodies. Behind that wall is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners, walk other free men. These free men carry objects above their heads – models of vases, puppets, bird cages, shrubs – in such a way as to cast the shadows of these items onto the wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners, not having known anything else, assume these to be reality, never realising that they are mere shadows of things, and certainly not aware that the models are inspired by real objects outside the cave.
The cave wall is the canvas, and we are the prisoners; the paint upon the canvas is the shadow of the things that Sun carries in his memory/imagination. In the allegory, this would make Sun one of the free men, and the things he carries – his memory/imagination – models of real things. These models might be the paintings and drawings of other artists, films stills, photographs, recollections.
As the allegory continues, Plato asks us to suppose that a prisoner is freed. Seeing the models and the fire, he can’t make sense of these things and he withdraws to the shadows again. The free man, however, drags the prisoner “…by force, up the rough ascent, the steep way up, and never stop until he could drag him out into the light of the sun.” There, the prisoner is pained by the light, but as his eyes adjust, he at first sees only shadows, then outlines, then the details of things. He sees the stars and the moon, and eventually, he can look at the sun and all the richness of the real. Accustomed to the light, he returns to the cave to tell the other prisoners what he has seen, and, entering the darkness again, he is temporarily blinded. The other prisoners interpret his blindness as a harm caused by whatever lies outside of their field of vision, and determine not to undertake the same journey. Plato concludes that the prisoners would therefore try to kill anyone who attempted to take them from the cave. He does not mention, however, the fate of the free man, carrying his models back and forth in front of the fire, who presumably must suffer the same fate as the prisoner each time he exits the cave, and who no doubt feels a deep sorrow each time he must re-enter. Much is made of the allegory and the notion of our world as an inferior copy of some pure form; less mention is made of the sorrow of the free man.
“All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.” (Peter and Wendy, By J.M. Barrie, 1911)
The story of Peter and Wendy is, fundamentally, the story of understanding death, grief, loss, and acceptance. For all the adventures and pirates, fairies and flying, at heart, it is the story of a child coming to terms with grief, and worse, forgetting those who have passed. Peter isn’t a boy who never wants to grow up, he is a boy who wants to constantly forget that others grow old, move on, and die. A seemingly formative memory for Sun is the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger when he was twelve years old. January 28, 1986. I remember it clearly, watching it on our old television, lying on the floor in my shorts with my shirt off because it was summer holidays and it was hot. I remember the gasp of the television presenter when it exploded and how everyone for a moment tried to convince themselves that what we were all seeing was perfectly normal. Ten thousand kilometres away, Sun apparently wondered how we could be so damned clever to be able to make these machines that fly us into space, and yet so fragile that we can disappear in seconds. I watched the column of smoke break into two billowing arrows, one ascending, and one arcing, falling back to earth, like Wendy and the boys when the forget to concentrate on flying. I remember the wooden floor sticking to my bare stomach and my hair feeling all spiked with sweat. All the parts of the rocket had yet fallen back to earth before I was on my feet and running out to the swimming pool. Death happens all the time, but life goes on.
His series To The Stars was inspired, in part, by an accident in which he ruptured his achilles tendon. Looking at the x-rays, he looked at the inner parts of his own body and felt some affinity with the universe – in looking at the smallest thing, one discovers worlds. The preoccupation with mortality only seems to have picked up pace from there, with references to entropy, tributes to disaster, Neverland, each coming in waves.
I think at this point that it is safe to say out loud that there is a psychoanalytical aspect that runs through his practice, a sort-of self-soothing. I spoke before of his works as being like memetic devices, but what I can’t be sure of is whether they are a means by which to store memories elsewhere so that he can forget them, or if he paints, so that he can remember.