Light Energy, Dark Matter: Notes on Sun Yao’s Landscape-NeverlandPaintings 

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(Excerpts)

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By Raul Zamudio 

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Sun Yao: Self-Consistentis 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 Landscape-Neverland, 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. 

 

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.

 

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 Landscape-Neverland 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 Landscape-Neverland 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. 

 

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 (1914-26) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Andy Warhol’ s Shadows (1978-79) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Landscape-Neverlandpaintings 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 Landscape-Neverlandcorpus 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-Consistentand the Landscape-Neverland 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. 

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Liang Project Co Space

Artist: Sun Yao

Duration: 2019.6.23 – 2019.7.21

Opening: 2019.6.23 16:00

Address: Room 102, Building 18, No.50 Moganshan Road, Putuo District, Shanghai

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