EXHIBITIONSSun Yifei: Ten Sniglets

Start Museum SSSSTART will present the thirteenth exhibition of Genealogy Study of Artists Sun Yifei: Ten Sniglets on 2022 November 25th.

“Ten Sniglets” will present ten “Sun-style stories” in the form of an exhibition, including six colourful acrylic works and four concise line drawings. Sun Yifei’s paintings have a virtual quality that is both detailed and distorted, almost like a 3D game image. The “stories” in the exhibition cannot be simply described or expressed in words, while the images present the structure and the plot, the beginning and the end of the story at the same time. Just as the exhibition’s English title “Ten Sniglets” emphasises – things that cannot be articulated in precise terms, the “linguistic gap” that exists from time to time in the communication among various cultures and different individuals. It is an imagination that can only be perfected by images and non-linear logic — the unique character of Sun Yifei’s paintings.

Sun Yifei consciously avoids the current popular discussion of “de-narrative” painting and instead moves into the practice of creating and discussing narrative reality and inner structural logic in images. In the process of transforming the established logic of the mass of pictorial material, Sun Yifei actively cultivates the environment, thereby constructing new subjects and stories. The artist is influenced by multiple sources including the pictorial dislocations of Surrealist artist René Magritte, the early political satire of German Neo-Expressionist artist Jorg Immendorff, and the exaggerated imagination of Japanese cartoonists like Ariko Hirohiko.  This thread runs throughout the history of twentieth-century imagery, and is the enlightenment of the millennial generation at the end of the century regarding the dissemination of images. As a typical example, Sun Yifei together with young Western painters such as Jamian Juliano-Villani, has formed a concern for the visual experience of the present.

Just as Lacan carried out his practice by rewriting Freud, and Zizek carried out his political critique by rewriting Lacan, Sun Yifei broke the flat “narrative” and reconstructed the experience of viewing by appropriating and reorganising classical images, leaving behind reflections on the futurity of painting from a young artist growing up in the “Generation Z”.