Topographies of The Self is a solo exhibition of the painter Sun Yao, whose title alludes to the symbiosis between landscape and identity. Geography has been historically thought to be untainted, objective and generally outside the bounds of culture; for in one sense we are born into culture as opposed to nature. This, however, is erroneous: not only is place tied to our sense of self, but in our globalized milieu any environment be it country or city, for instance, can transcend its geography by virtue of its inhabitants who bring an aspect of that locale to far flung areas of the world. For example: A Spanish vintner or a New York businessman embody aspects of their culture as well as their geography, regardless whether one is rural and the other urban which, in turn, is the social baggage they pack and unpack when travelling abroad. This, of course, becomes even more complicated since culture and place are more often than not heterogeneous rather than monolithic as attested by the protean nature of the local engendered by communications and computer technologies such as the Internet.
With the advent of globalization in which disparate geographies and cultures become more and more accessible, the fabric of the geo-cultural is ever changing, in flux, and analogous to the postmodern condition of the self. That is, that it is not something deterministic, essential, or fixed, but fluid, mutable and open-ended. Topographies of The Self is an exhibition that is more than an exploration of the symbiosis between self and place as it investigates how deeply the individual and the collective are linked and at the same time severed, from their environments. It explores this through myriad ideas including the sublime, the contingency of the self, and the thesis that nature is anything but natural.
Sun Yao’s paintings underscore how the world we inhabit is intrinsically connected to our psyche, much like other artists who have explored landscape’s affectation. The German Romantic artist Casper David Friedrich, for example, depicted nature as sublime, albeit as embodied with the metaphysical. Another artist who came in the wake of Friedrich and conceived sublimity differently is the British painter J.W.M. Turner. Both artists differed in their articulation of the sublime; the former configured it as extension and manifestation of the transcendent, while the latter interpreted it as an extension of the moral absolute. Regardless, Friedrich’s and Turner’s idea of sublimity can be traced to the philosopher Edmund Burke. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Burke proposed that beauty and the sublime were mutually exclusive, but yet paradoxically connected. The sublime, for Burke, was as much about being awed by nature’s beauty as it was about the fear engendered by its uncontrollable violence in which humans are seemingly at its mercy.
The dichotomy of the sublime where one aspect refers to the majestic while the other embodies terror is underscored in any horrendous natural disaster; and though we regret and are despondent when humans perish as a result of natural calamities, we are often mesmerized by images of destruction and the havoc that it can cause to life as well as the built environment. One only need to see on Youtube the many viewer’s hits of filmed tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and so forth to understand how the human mind is repulsed and concomitantly attracted to nature’s terrifying destructive powers. An ostensible universal coping mechanism in the face of the absurdity of nature’s infliction of mass death is when we construe it as an “act of god”. That is, that nature’s brutal violence resulting in the wanton loss of life is so inexplicable and so unfathomable that it is attributed to providence. Burke would argue, however, that it is not a case of humans being morbid or insensitive to the loss of human life that keeps us from watching images of destruction, but that the dichotomy of repulsion/attraction as sublime is analogous to human faculty for the aesthetic; that the recognition of the beautiful as intrinsic to human consciousness is also what makes it difficult for us to turn our eyes away from nature’s upending aggression. This is crucial in understanding how sublimity works in the paintings of Friedrich and Turner, and intrinsic to the mesmerizing artistry of Sun Yao.
The powerful and poetic quality of Sun Yao’s work partially stems from a reworking of the landscape tradition into wholly different configurations. This is apparent when juxtaposing Friedrich’s The Monk by The Sea (1808-1810), and Sun Yao’s Deep Forest N0. 15 (2010). While the latter is part of the corpus known as Deep Forest and generally concerns various interpretations of the confluence of flora and the human body, this painting alludes to the aquatic as well as terrestrial. This may have to do with Sun Yao’s handling of paint and his hypnotic use of chiaroscuro: pigment swirls to and fro and explodes like chaotic arabesques across the surface of his paintings and within pictorial space. And the execution of this painterly exuberance runs the gamut of thin, almost diffused simulated washes to heavy graphic marks as well as thicker passages of impasto. There is also the monumental format of Sun Yao’s paintings in general that create a similar ambiance to The Monk by The Sea.
In Friedrich’s famous work, a monk stands at the shore of the sea while solemnly pondering divinity and looking out into its glorious yet gothic infinitude. The enveloping presence of the sea that engulfs the monk is analogous to how Sun Yao creates anthropomorphic forms that congeal against the amorphousness of trees making it difficult to tell where one supersedes the other. Are the individuals that populate the landscape more prominent or subservient to the latter? In creating an either/or aesthetic conundrum, Sun Yao inscribes this painting with meaning beyond than what meets the eye: phantasmagoria of spirit-like entities pulsate and animate the picture as if we are glimpsing a fleeting magic lantern of projections conjured from the deep recesses of the unconscious. To be sure, we are looking at a painting yet there is something underneath and within it that both beckon us as well as creating a sensation of aesthetic dissipation. Like Sun Yao, Turner too, developed a particular notion of the sublime but his work was often imbued with an ethical if not moral imperative.
In Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840), which is one of the most famous works by the English painter, traffickers in human cargo are horrifically meeting their demise by virtue of an uncontrollable sea storm. But this work is not just the nineteenth-century equivalent to what is known in Hollywood as the disaster film. To be sure, what is occurring in the picture is what the painting’s title alludes. Turner, however, is depicting something more than just the dreadful fate of a ship at the mercy of tumultuous weather; for it is also the institution of slavery that is being destroyed, not so much by the pristine sea but by divine retribution that condemns that enslavement of a human by another. It is apparent that Sun’s picture is a metaphor for the human condition as well, for he conveys to us the drama of what it is to deal with existential questions of as to our rightful place in a world where we are sometimes in conflict with nature, but also even at odds with ourselves.
Stated differently, Sun Yao’s picture, like his other works, operates like an opaque mirror that reflects humanity unsettled and possibly even in a state of disequilibrium. This is formally and conceptually underscored in a plethora of ways including the painting’s undulating prominent light that comes from the upper right hand corner and sharply cuts a diagonal down the center to the bottom left hand side. It concomitantly creates a swirling mass of illumination set against the contours and edges of flora. In turn, this photonic cascade seems to anchor and simultaneously diffuse matter multi-directionally. Effervescently kaleidoscopic, shadow and light are equally as contingent to each other in this masterful composition as silence is to sound, as negative absence is to a sculpture’s presence. Interplay, dialectic, and point/counterpoint between darkness and its other, as well as the manifold gradations in between these two poles are germane to the overall monochrome of Sun Yao’s palette. This work, as well as the general corpus of the Deep Forest series, takes the monochrome from its historical context and conflates it with an older artistic from, consequently arriving at a distinct aesthetic that is unquestionably the style of Sun Yao.
One artist that comes to mind who similarly works with the monochrome but within the context of thematic figuration is Mark Tansey. Tansey’s psychologically driven narratives undermine the monochrome’s history that was often thought to be solely the register of Minimalism and earlier forms of pure, geometric abstraction. Sun Yao, however, not only tropes these with verve and deftness but his work also reaches farther back to the genre of the grisaille. The Gothic artists Jean Pucelle and Giotto, as well as those from the Renaissance including Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Mantegna, and the Mannerist painter and engraver Hendrik Goltzius, were just a few among many that worked in grisaille for practical and aesthetic reasons. Another aspect of the grisaille that is the consensus is that in lesser artistic hands, the inferior artist is quickly revealed. This has to do with the fact that the artist cannot obscure his talent or lack thereof, behind polychromatic painting.
When looking at Sun Yao’s painting with their monochromatic palette and attendant grisaille reference, it becomes apparent the breadth and depth of this artist’s talent. For in reducing his color range to the singular, it not only underscores his mastery of the medium, but one understands how germane light and dark is for his artistic practice. Light is a key factor in Deep Forest No. 15, as it is in Sun Yao’s other pictures, and adds formal texture and compositional buoyancy while heightening emotional content. This is how Sun Yao breaks from his Romantic antecedents and moves his practice into more contemporary artistic registers whose aesthetic vocabulary is akin, for example, to the desolate landscapes of Anselm Kiefer. But Sun Yao’s paintings are, however, polyvalent and lend themselves to broader narratives that poetically explore the condition of self as an aggregate to a geographical gestalt. His arborous imagery is, of course, offset by the infusion of anthropomorphic forms. Individuals seem to vaporize before our eyes as the artist interjects more than humanoid phantoms; for their emotive qualities are cathartically conveyed through the coupling of figuration and landscape. Look, for instance at another exemplary work from the Deep Forest series such as Deep Forest No. 14 (2010).
Deep Forest No. 15 is arborous yet evocatively atmospheric. Most works by Sun Yao from the Deep Forest series have this ethereal quality to them; the dialectic between the tangible and the seemingly vaporous gives the paintings a visually poetic temperament of levity and gravity. But whereas Deep Forest No. 15 has these attributes of lightness and density, of an admixture of both center and periphery through a painterly dispersion, Deep Forest No. 14 takes on an earthier material form. Continuing with Sun Yao’s mainstay of forest and phantasmagoria, this work may be characterized as being more terrestrial if not subterranean. It transmits materiality much more than other paintings of these series via what appears to be a vast underground interiority. The faces and bodies in Deep Forest No. 14 have different resonance than Deep Forest No. 15 by virtue of their association within and above the geography on which Sun Yao portrays a wide range of human emotions. Varied and complex, most of the artist’s iconography of bodies and faces of both genders, work ostensibly in equal cohesion; here and there, however, it seems that he can also paint this configuration the other way around. In Deep Forest No. 7, for example, a monumental face seems to dominate the composition to the degree that bodies as well as the forest and flora are subservient to it.
The hallucinatory visage is archetypal: because of its overpowering presence, one cannot help think of Jungian psychology and the archetype. And like the famed psychologist’s theory of the collective unconscious from where these archetypes emerge, the forms that make up Deep Forest No. 7 and that gel together to make up eyes, nose mouth and so forth confront that viewer in a more direct manner. Other works generally have this larger face that meshes with arborous signifiers, but it may be that Deep Forest No. 7 is the most unsettling. While the artist has never mentioned as to the source or what this or any other forms mean to him, it would not be out to the realm of possibility that the monumental face on where is placed other figures may be a self-portrait. Not self-portrait in the traditional sense, because the rendering is not close to the artist’s likeness, but it could be that the overpowering visage that dominates and is recurring motif, is an alter ego of the artist. In this sense, Sun Yao has come full circle. For though other artists had grappled with the sublime as manifesting in nature externally, Sun Yao’s sublime is one of interiority.
Sun Yao’s art is a metaphorical journey into the deepest recesses of our being where we may dread not to go, confront, or come to terms with. The reason for this is as much our complacency as it is a negation of what Socrates once stated in the affirmative, to know thyself. Self-knowledge may be the most demanding undertaking for it takes a brutal honesty. Sun Yao’s paintings are testament to his artistic authenticity; he creates work not only for aesthetic reasons but is deeply committed to a practice that is engaged with life as well as philosophical questions including the nature of being. In the pilgrimage that he calls art, he is telling us through this beautiful complex body of work that it may be that the self is elusive only because we are it. The farther we move away from ourselves, the farther the self becomes. Sun Yao’s paintings are visual poetic mappings if his own peregrination through a forest of imagination; in short, it is a topography of the self.