Living in the Moment exhibition poster

Living in the Moment

Here and Now

活在当下

玉坤个展

Type 类型 Solo Exhibition 个展
Date 日期 October 12 – 17, 2019
Venue 场地 Library, Shangyuan Art Museum
Huairou District, Beijing
上苑艺术馆图书馆
北京怀柔区
Academic 学术主持 肖毓方 Xiao Yufang
Curator 策展人 聂以为 Nie Yiwei

Installation · 2019

装置艺术 · 2019

Moss

苔藓

Live moss, stones, automated misting system · Shangyuan Art Museum, Beijing

活体苔藓、石头、自动喷雾系统 · 上苑艺术馆,北京

Moss installation — misting garden view

Automated misting system sustaining the living moss — water sprayed for five minutes every half hour.

自动喷雾系统维持活体苔藓生长——每半小时喷水五分钟。

Artist Yukun Sun with moss installation in gallery Moss installation detail Moss installation overhead — stones and text pages

Installation Statement

装置陈述

This living installation was conceptualized and created during my time as the Artist-in-Residence at the Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing. Moss serves as a poignant metaphor for the existence of ordinary individuals navigating immense social structures. Like moss, they are infinitesimally small, inherently fragile, and fundamentally conditioned to rely on the balance and stability of the overarching systemic ecosystem merely to survive.

Driven by this observation, I engineered an automated ecological installation. I constructed a misting system strictly programmed to spray water for exactly five minutes every half hour. This mechanical, life-sustaining rhythm operated relentlessly leading up to my solo exhibition. Under this rigorously controlled environment, I cultivated a bed of living moss, bringing the bio-artwork to fruition.

Through this time-based, living installation, I intend to evoke viewers' empathy for marginalized and vulnerable communities. More importantly, it aims to provoke a profound philosophical reflection on the concepts of "dependency" and "systemic inertia" within the human condition.

Installation · 2019

装置艺术 · 2019

Individual & Sequence

个体与序列

Stones, mirror, wood frame · Shangyuan Art Museum, Beijing

石头、镜子、木框架 · 上苑艺术馆,北京

Individual and Sequence — framed mirror and stone line on gallery wall Individual and Sequence — close-up of stone line on wall

A line of small stones traverses the gallery wall, interrupted by a wood-framed mirror — the boundary between organic sequence and reflective consciousness.

一排小石子横贯展厅墙面,被一面木框镜子打断——有机序列与反思意识之间的边界。

Installation · 2019

装置艺术 · 2019

Sequence and Confinement

序列与禁锢

Glass, steel bar, chair, paint, spirit level · 2019

玻璃、钢筋、椅子、颜料、水平仪 · 2019

Sequence and Confinement — steel cube with chair

Steel bar cube enclosing a single chair — an illusory room defined by edges without walls.

钢筋方框围住单把椅子——由棱而无墙的幻觉空间。

Sequence and Confinement — ink on glass panel detail

Ink and paint on vertical glass panel — shadow and mark converging on the gallery floor.

玻璃板上的墨与颜料——阴影与笔迹交汇于展厅地面。

Glass mirror · 55 × 55 cm · 2019

玻璃镜 · 55 × 55 厘米 · 2019

Scar

Glass mirror, 55 × 55 cm · 2019

玻璃镜 · 55 × 55 厘米 · 2019

Scar — shattered glass mirror with white painted forms

Shattered and painted glass mirror — cracks as arrested catastrophe, fragmentation as formal language.

破碎并着色的玻璃镜——裂纹作为被定格的灾难,碎裂化为形式语言。

Installation · 2019

装置艺术 · 2019

Dialogue With Traditional

与传统对话

Glass, ceramic, cement · 2019

玻璃、陶瓷、水泥 · 2019

Dialogue With Traditional — glass panels with red thread and ink shadows

Vertical glass panels carry painted ink imagery; a red thread binds the composition — traditional Chinese pictorial logic reinterpreted through transparent industrial materials.

竖立的玻璃板承载着水墨图像;一条红线贯穿构图——通过透明工业材料重新诠释中国传统绘画逻辑。

Review of Yukun Sun Exhibition

孙玉坤展览评论

"The subtle world hidden in the cracks and undergrowth of human perspective"

What does it mean to find the purpose and meaning in every accident that happens along the way? The question that made itself apparent upon entering the artwork of Yukun Sun, a journey into the corners, the edges into the materials, making themselves under the process of tension. This is the tension of life, the pressure, vibration of different forces that eventually make the cracks that define the life. They live a life of their own, revealing the beauty of spontaneity, the depth of imaginary abysses and at the same time the lightness of being. The ability to distance oneself from the situation and observe almost Chinese traditional aesthetics in the interplay of lines, the delicate world, a delicate balance between the extremes, between a human and what surrounds this experience of living in the moment.

The moment changes, like water, making the cracks in solid objects, irreversible formations as a result of experiences, different circumstances all contributing to something sublime. Just like nature waves the net of cause and effect, so does Yukun Sun's artwork, making a statement, connecting the accidental and purposeful, making us question what is the spontaneity of now, this ever escaping experience of now. Rendering the delicate structure of a moss almost frozen in time, as we look at the juxtaposition between the mirrors talking to each other in shape, while the only purpose of a moss in this circumstance is to stay alive, to grow.

The process of growth, also a result of a cause and effect somehow resonates with this collection, accidental becoming purposeful, purpose redefining itself constantly, following the water, filling in the cracks of circumstances of life. Morality emerges, like a silent observer, as the world changes in the kaleidoscope of cause and effect. We are wondering what is the right choice, a life lead in such a way that it makes the least cracks in time, or the one that makes the most. Yukun Sun's artwork gives us a rare insight through the distance from ourselves, we become an observer of the observed. Through different mediums, we travel through this journey from subtle inner world of paintings with the special type of omnipresence, hinting at the corners of the world, to the most expressive and dramatic pieces with the broken mirrors. The fragmentation is giving integrity to the individual pieces but taking it from the whole, making us think deeper, question our actions.

The subject of fragmentation proceeds through with the art piece: broken plate, that interacts with the material that wants to fill in the gaps, it is twisting and turning the space and time around it, reaching further away from itself. It is still limited by the predicament of human existence, conditions of gravity, space and time but somehow it finds the balance, and then it flourishes through the power of line, rooted in the traditional Chinese painting, the line plays with the viewer from unique perspectives, upright and unyielding. This transcends into the pieces dedicated to the traditional technique, a painting that observes the nature, balances everything, internalizes the world around it in finding the peace, timeless. This idyllic atmosphere is again juxtaposed with the lines of life, colored in red, organized in geometric patterns, representing sometimes ruthless, the nature of our civilization. The two worlds seem to be existing on the two different planes, unable to touch each other and yet directly changing each other thanks to light.

This brings us back to the beginning, a moment in time interlaced by many accidents and meaningful or meaningless lines that wave the life in many directions, we just have to be the observers capable of distancing ourselves into the plane that exists outside of this intricate web.

On Individual & Sequence

Yukun Sun flits between varying uses of man-made and natural materials, and spatial and temporal scenarios, from sudden cracks in a mirror to gradual fostering of moss on his homemade archipelago, always in a playful manner. His practice freezes points of destruction, magnifies the minute, and isolates and crystallises moments that are easy to ignore, all for us to align our own struggles with.

In the case of Individual & Sequence, we see an installation that purifies a sense of boundaries and dualistic relationships. There is the boundary of organic forms, the stones, around the edges of a human space, along with the small mirror that offers us an opposite plane to our current state. This is followed by the contrast between Sun's white dreamlike refuge and the more easily recognisable world outside of the exhibition space. Finally, within this natural perimeter the artist has created, he harnesses a further area of space in a firm steel structure albeit with an illusory membrane that the shape's rigidity suggests. The lack of sides but hard presence of edges and corners leave the true nature of the space to the scope of our imaginations, yet ultimately ungraspable.

Between these two spatial forces and their states of dominance in this installation — the thick, forthright metal and the emptiness within its structure — is a pendulum continuously swinging, tangible to intangible, positive to negative. Which one governs the other? As our focus changes, one becomes more significant than the other, but then the other overtakes it.

Amidst this uncertain swaying, we can sit in tranquility within the boundaries of the structure. Although we can step into the space through the invisible walls or even through the doorway without opening it, in one light the wide imposing door still creates a forceful scenario of invitation, a beckoning, a magnetic obligation to follow a custom we can recognise. Microcosmic of our attraction to order, the simple shape invites a straightforward, polite response.

Soothe My Pain With Your Tenderness — full painting

Acrylic on canvas, masking tape · 120 × 60 cm · 2020

丙烯颜料、遮蔽胶带 · 120 × 60 厘米 · 2020

Soothe My Pain With Your Tenderness

用你的温柔抚慰我的痛

Paper tape exists as an inherently fragile medium, profoundly mirroring the existential vulnerability of marginalized lives. I meticulously collaged it onto an oil painting, allowing the subtle nuances of brushwork and color to converge — an inevitable encounter born out of pure chance. This method bridges the artwork with my own lived experience, authentically laying bare my inner state of being.

Crucially, paper tape possesses a naturally low adhesive quality, which is precisely its defining functional trait. As time passes, it randomly curls and peels away from the canvas. My recurring physical act of pressing it back down and smoothing it out transforms into an ongoing, indeterminate output of action. Through a highly succinct visual language, this piece continuously probes the intrinsic physical properties of the medium. In doing so, the raw, vital tension of the material itself is relentlessly reawakened.

The Truth of Devouring — acrylic on canvas

Acrylic on canvas · 120 × 120 cm · 2019

丙烯颜料 · 120 × 120 厘米 · 2019

The Truth of Devouring

吞噬的真相

The tension, texture, and collision of colors stripped of metaphor — the canvas as a site of pure material event. Washes of white dissolve into residues of earth, indigo, and crimson, each layer a record of physical gesture.

Let me act wild in the snow — acrylic on canvas

Acrylic on canvas · 120 × 120 cm · 2019

丙烯颜料 · 120 × 120 厘米 · 2019

Let Me Act Wild in the Snow

让我在雪中肆意妄为

Pale, kinetic marks traverse an almost-white field — charcoal lines arrested mid-gesture, snow as both subject and structural logic. The painting refuses to settle into composition, insisting instead on the unfinished moment.

Through the Darkest Hour — red ceramic close-up Through the Darkest Hour — white ceramic vessel

Two iterations of Through the Darkest Hour — red and white ceramic · 2021

《度过最黑暗的时刻》两件——红色与白色陶瓷 · 2021

Ceramic · 2021

陶瓷 · 2021

Through the Darkest Hour

度过最黑暗的时刻

Collection Statement

系列陈述

This series was created in the spring of 2021 in China. As the pandemic surged with overwhelming force, society as a whole was engulfed by an inescapable sense of panic and helplessness. For the first time in my life, I felt the suffocating weight of an apocalyptic atmosphere.

Under those extreme circumstances, the relentless, almost obsessive process of creating this series became my sole refuge — the only way to alleviate my profound internal anxiety. The repetitive physical act of art-making served as a silent prayer, expressing my deepest hope that my family would remain safe and healthy, and that together, we would survive our darkest hour.