SUN Xun (Beijing)

What Happened in the Year of the Dragon, 2015, single-channel video, color, sound, 10 min.

This animation recounts key events that occurred during the year of the dragon, one of the most important years in the Chinese calendar. Emblematic of Sun Xun’s oeuvre, the film acts as a theatre of memory, replete with shuttering sequences and jarring juxtapositions of surrealistic and recognizable images, which collectively serve to scrape the uncontested surface of politicized truth.

About the artist:

Sun Xun fuses the line between art and animation to create captivating videos that investigate recent and past histories and intransigent conflicts and tensions. A former professor and graduate from the China Academy of Arts, Sun Xun founding his own Animation Studio, π in 2006. His practice involves creating images using various materials such as colored powder, woodcuts and traditional ink, and collating these to produce a film, which is often presented in an immersive setting. Sun Xun has held multiple solo exhibitions around the world, most notably at The Drawing Center, New York; the Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel and most recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.