This early engagement with know-how also right informs Sun’s current method to painting, which incorporates equally classic and electronic procedures. “Befriending machines as companions and finding home in equally physical and digital worlds played a particular function in my formative decades, because we normally need boundaries to deal with ourselves in position,” she says. “This working experience naturally led me to combine electronic tools inside analogous techniques to portray, exploring themes like identification, intake, and the psychology driving up to date society’s increasing attachment to technologies.” These digital resources incorporate systems these as Photoshop, which Sun takes advantage of to develop preliminary sketches which she then assignments on to the canvas and paints employing a combination of airbrushing and hand-painting. The end result is get the job done that has the softness and tactility of regular portray, with the described varieties and precision of digital imagery.
Thematically, Sun’s get the job done is also greatly affected by her childhood – migration as a important aspect of her lifetime is also a major concept inside of her follow. Her exhibit previous year, titled A Castle Created of Sand (a nod to the impermanence of these types of buildings), explored “the migration of digital images that we have interaction with each and every day”. Speaking on the thought, she says: “I was drawn to wonder wherever these visuals are coming from, what their voyage looks like, and to in which they disappear when they leave our field of eyesight. The resulting will work introduced in this show floor themselves on these motion, transience, and volatility of virtual bodies.” This materials, which Sunlight initial engaged with as pictures showing up briefly on her display, has been collected and given a bodily kind to dwell in, so as to “anchor” it prior to it slips away.
In lots of ways, this body of function encapsulates the driving forces at the rear of Sun’s art and some of the pivotal times of her daily life. We witness and feel the existence of movement and migration inside of the photographs and are given insightful, though often cryptic insights into her past. In a person these types of instance, a painting titled Ghost, we see a stationary pojangmacha – a variety of travelling truck in South Korea that sells food items and drink every single evening and disappears in the early several hours of the early morning. As a youngster, Solar was fascinated by these vans, and questioned in which they retired to in the course of the daytime and if she would be ready to see them yet again, as some hardly ever returned to the identical place: “Unbound by physical constraints, they moved all around amongst neighbourhoods, and still left for good when they required to.” In just this painting, the nomadic bar is anchored in a digital placing that resembles “an not known hinterland” and a reimagined destination for its mysterious migration. As this kind of, Sunshine is equipped to tie down the elusive truck from her childhood the distant memory of it and the transient electronic picture in which she rediscovered it.