Lin Jiao, a cross-disciplinary figure · Sun Wenjia | Build an island of light, shaping the form of time in the present
Original Little Linlin Horn LINJOY 2021-06-22 11:29
2021Tuesday, 22 June
Lin Jiao·Crossover Figure
Sun Wenjia
The horn of the qilin, the graceful PR poetry light of 'Zhou Nan', communicates through works, offering deep insights and voices within the industry. Kind and virtuous, upholding values and public-minded power within the Chinese context, exploring the philosophy of life and aesthetic realms of the era
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He graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the College of Fine Arts at Fujian Normal University
Now focusing on lacquer art, his works have been repeatedly selected for national exhibitions. He constantly explores the spatial domain of painting and has continually expanded the boundaries of media expression. He imagines standing at the future section of the river of time, recording the past, present, and future, preserving the personally fabricated shapes of time. He is the visual artist Sun Wenjia.
01.
Dare to make mistakes
Art is always elsewhere
Sun Wenjia was born in 1986 in Zhouning County, in the northeast of Fujian Province. It is a beautiful county town located on the eastern foothills of the Jiufeng Mountains, at an altitude of over 800 metres, with a subtropical monsoon mountainous climate, known as the "Pearl of the Mountains" and a "Natural Air-Conditioned City". Born into a large family, his parents generally adopted a laissez-faire approach, allowing Sun Wenjia to spend his entire childhood freely in close contact with nature, wandering amongst it. This also meant that when Sun Wenjia recalls his childhood years many years later, his language is always imbued with brightness.
As a child, I often caught birds in the woods and fished by the streams. Material life in the 1980s and 1990s was relatively scarce; there were few toys or forms of entertainment, but nature was my best companion. This kind of innocent, even wild, growth gave me unique experiences and developed my sensitivity to observing things, as if I could truly hear the sound of bamboo shoots growing in the bamboo forest after a spring rain. Moreover, as a young boy, I found a medium to express myself in the mountains and fields—the local kaolin clay. I used this clay to shape various images of the plants and animals I saw. Looking back, this stage was probably my initial experience and simulation of touching the world.
In the fifth grade, the local cultural centre held a calligraphy and painting competition, and Sun Wenjia won first place in the whole school, which was a huge encouragement for him. His mother bought him tools and sketchbooks, believing he had a special talent and supporting him in pursuing it. Even today, he still remembers that one of the books his mother bought was a landscape painting album by Zhang Daqian, printed in Taiwan. Although the printing quality was rather crude back then, this book gave him great enlightenment and made him vaguely sense another possibility in life. At that time, artists and art practitioners in Zhou Ning, Fujian, were very few. Later, his mother contacted a teacher who graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Fujian Normal University, and the mother and son brought a large stack of works to visit this mentor. After seeing the works, the teacher told him: you must forget your previous painting content and methods, start anew, and shift from linear modelling to thinking in surfaces.
Afterwards, Sun Wenjia gradually embarked on a systematic professional path, receiving solid Western training in sketching, and later he was admitted to the Oil Painting Department of Fujian Normal University. In his youth, Sun Wenjia was not constrained by the academic training methods; on the contrary, he was very interested in various artistic schools at home and abroad. He enjoyed the intense emotional expression of German Expressionism, and the sense of power in painting fascinated him. The large and uninhibited brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism, as well as the passion of throwing paint onto the canvas, also resonated strongly with him. At this time, Sun Wenjia began to vaguely desire to explore ways to release the creativity within his subconscious, using his early personal memories as a method and medium for creation.
Spatial installation artwork
After graduating from the Oil Painting Department of Normal University in 2010, Sun Wenjia began engaging in spatial arrangement, art installations, art curation, and fine arts creation. In practice, he started considering which mediums could better present and represent his ideas, and he also pondered more general aesthetic concepts. His works, based on visual experience, place greater emphasis on tactile expression.
Spatial installation artwork
With the accumulation of artistic practice and thought, Sun Wenjia increasingly considers his creations from cultural and regional perspectives, feeling the necessity for more systematic knowledge organisation and in-depth vertical exploration. In 2018, he returned to his alma mater to focus on lacquer art research. As his theoretical and practical expertise gradually matured, the goals of his study naturally became clearer. Coupled with his early study of oil painting, he was able to contemplate the possibilities of lacquer art from the perspective of spatial modelling of form and colour. He integrates colour application with material techniques, creating vibrant and distinctive spatial images, gradually expressing some novel and unique ideas, thereby gaining attention in the field of lacquer art.
Installation artwork '0.15 Cubic Metres of Wind'
During his postgraduate years, Sun Wenjia was greatly influenced and enlightened by two perspectives from his mentor Mr Tang Zhiyi. The teacher said: Art lies elsewhere — one cannot seek art within art itself, and new art often comes from things beyond art. "Art lies elsewhere" refers to a new state of artistic
creation, emphasising space and blurring time, which later became the opportunity for Sun Wenjia to focus on spatial forms. The teacher's other perspective was: Be brave in making mistakes — art requires exploration, overturning established perceptions, breaking barriers, and seeking a sense of unfamiliarity, because painting familiar subjects loses surprise, power, and reflective capacity, becoming an inertia of expression similar to muscle memory. Moreover, fear of making mistakes makes breakthroughs difficult. When an artist's expectations of a work are excessively idealised or even perfect, they bear a psychological burden, are afraid to make mistakes, and hence cannot innovate.
02.
The meaning of the work itself
Continuously adding mutual interaction and growth
Chinese lacquer painting has long been dependent on utensils, furniture and architecture, mostly existing as decorative illustrations. Sun Wenjia believes that contemporary lacquer art, as an independent new art form, should not only break free from reliance on utilitarian objects, but also carry out innovations in artistic concepts, especially in material and technique. The modern transformation and contemporary change of lacquer art should start from the independence of its own language materials, serving the artist's internal observations and perceptions of the surrounding world, and expressing the artist's conceptual consciousness, rather than focusing on the realism of images or the narrative of events.
Lacquer painting work "Brilliant Movement" Meanwhile, Sun Wenjia also entered a new burst period of creation. He has always wanted to express his artistic feelings as quickly as possible, as he dislikes delay, believing that it would evaporate artistic inspiration and diminish the artist's creative passion. During this period, he achieved remarkable results: in August 2019, "0.15 Cubic Wind" was selected for the 'Step into Lacquer Words — National College Lacquer Art Works Invitational Exhibition', and in December of the same year, "Brilliant Movement" was selected for the Second China Youth Lacquer Painting Exhibition. In November 2020, "Material Evolution M01" was selected for the Third National Comprehensive Material Painting Exhibition
Rongqiao Bund No.1 has created a 'Time Island' and launched Sun Wenjia's solo exhibition 'Time Capsule'. On May 1st, Sun Wenjia held the double solo exhibition 'Returning to the Void and Entering the Whole' at Beijing Yuan Museum...
Lacquer installation work 'Material Performance Series'
This year's highly anticipated lacquer installation work 'Material Evolution Series' began experimentation and planning in the first half of 2019, recreating a dialogue between 'lacquer·material' and time. The Material Evolution M series aims to explore a state of material (form) evolution. M represents a parallel universe, where Sun Wenjia attempts to convey the spiritual shock or insight brought to him by the 'law of entropy increase': there may exist another universe outside our own, whose form we cannot know, but if it does not exist, if no external universe inputs energy into ours, the ultimate fate of the universe would be total disorder, silence, and death. This leads Sun Wenjia to ponder: what is life? What is the enemy of life? What will be the future of humanity? Why does time have direction? He seeks to explore in his works the vitality of a system represented by negative entropy.
Partial view of the lacquer installation work 'Wuyuan Series'
As the initiator and observer of the dialogue, Sun Wenjia participated in the displacement of a sculptural installation within a space. This displacement began at the source of the Minjiang River in Junkou Town, Jianning, Sanming City, Fujian, spanning four regions over a distance of 577 kilometres, and finally ended on Langqi Island, Mawei, Fuzhou. This 45-day drift from west to east seemingly restores the long past of the northern Fujian ancestors who transported goods by floating them downstream and using bamboo rafts along this waterway.
"Drifting on the Minjiang River" begins from the source of the Minjiang River
In order to ensure the smooth progress of the entire drifting plan, Sun Wenjia installed a real-time locator in the work, which connects with a mobile phone and allows its drifting trajectory to be checked at any time. Of course, there may be situations where it gets stuck or delayed, in which case it can only be moved manually. During this process, Sun Wenjia got to know a group of Fuzhou fishermen who live along the water. As descendants of the earliest Minjiang drifters, they left a deep impression on Sun Wenjia. Sun Wenjia strives to present different states of a river flow, exploring the relationship between Fuzhou, the Minjiang River, and lacquer, unconsciously reflecting the drifting nature of the Minjiang waterscape and a sense of time that traverses history.
Minjiang River Rafting Adventure
He also refers to the 'Evolution of Objects Series' as a 'time capsule', with initial inspiration drawn from the 'lacquered bow' unearthed at Kuahuqiao in Xiaoshan, Hangzhou. The discovery of this lacquered bow pushes the use of lacquer back a further thousand years from the Hemudu culture period. All of this is reshaped through symbolism: the time capsule does not have the cylindrical form of a 'capsule', but is simply a 'floating island' sealed with lacquer. The river becomes the backdrop of the work, even intervening to become an important component, playing the role of 'time'. Sun Wenjia attempts to view the present from the axis of history, indeed resonating with Confucius's lament, 'Time passes like this, ceaseless day and night.'
Regarding the concept of “holes” in his works, Sun Wenjia explains it as a microbial expression. Lacquer is an active material, so he also hopes his lacquer art works possess vitality. All living things on Earth have holes or plugs, and using holes to sense the changes of this world is the most important organ for energy metabolism. Because of this, the presence of holes makes the shrinkage ratio of the entire work very small, making it less prone to damage.
The “Object Evolution Series” does not aim to specifically refer to anything. Sun Wenjia sets the works in an open state, allowing each viewer to have their own unique sensory experience. The works themselves possess vitality, as if they are there waiting for the creator to convey information and “help” them replicate and present themselves. After the work is created,
he continuously examines and gazes at it, and the work itself constantly provides feedback, so the work is always “adding” meaning.
03.
evolution
Moving towards a multidimensional 'theatrical sense'
In the summer of 2018, Sun Wenjia first came into contact with raw lacquer. Like a child, he whimsically played with it, manipulating it as he had with kaolin in his childhood, even deliberately applying it between his fingers. Unexpectedly, three days later, he suffered from a full-body allergic reaction and unbearable itching. This experience gave Sun Wenjia a new perspective: he attempted to visualise this bodily perception, continuing the tactile expression experiments that had begun to emerge in his early years. "When you see my work, it is as if many needles pierce you, giving countless sensations and stimulating the soul."
This idea perhaps reached its pinnacle in Sun Wenjia's works of 'bodily object performance'. In February 2021, the "Time Capsule" exhibition at the "Island of Time" in Fuzhou Rongqiao Bund One became an art space related to the body and time. Six contemporary young dancers engaged with Sun Wenjia's work, using movements, expressions, and postures to express their understanding of the pieces, creating an immersive scene integrating lighting, dynamics, and sensing with a sense of future space-time. During this process, Sun Wenjia did not communicate much about the details of the work with the dancers, which allowed the dance interpretation to be freer. On one hand, the dancers tried to freely sense the material character, emotion, and temperature with their bodies, exploring the boundaries between the present and future of art. On the other hand, Sun Wenjia aimed to leave traces on the work through this experimental dance, achieving a reinterpretation of space and time. In his view, painting is a form of tracing, giving creations a sense of dignity endowed by humans. Ultimately, he believed that the dancers' bodily language achieved the delicacy and depth he wished to express in his work.
The issue that Sun Wenjia thinks about the most now is the 'theatrical sense' of his works, or rather the spatial domain of his works, breaking the two-dimensional space of traditional painting to achieve great inclusiveness in his works. In short, space is the work itself. When space is regarded as part of the work itself, it often tends towards diversity and cross-boundary. Cross-boundary approaches can better integrate two-dimensional painting with three-dimensional space, even producing slight disharmony or questionable distortion, which seems to enhance the viewing experience and guide the audience to examine the space before them from a new dimension.
Sun Wenjia, in pursuit of a 'theatrical sense', seems to have become a stage play director. He disassembles and recombines various art forms, turning them into a new scene and shaping the current time according to his personal imagination, conveying the process of objects growing and evolving. He no longer tries to depict the world in a rigidly realistic way. For him, lacquer art is not merely a tool for visual depiction, but a means to express his attitude and judgment towards others and the surrounding world, carrying concepts that far exceed its descriptive nature.
Sun Wenjia envisions casting himself into the future stretch of the river of time, looking back at the present from the axis of history. Those fabricated shapes of time can be preserved and kept; they are not time itself, but the externalised form of time in the visual arts. Every era has its own stylistic forms, and good works must have a sense of the times and contemporaneity, reflecting the creator's unique personal experiences and feelings.
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One specific manifestation of 'contemporaneity' in the 'Evolution of Objects' series is Sun Wenjia's continuous exploration and incorporation of new materials in his recent works, such as the use of stainless steel. He attempts to expand the original limitations of lacquer art, reflecting the broadness of artistic interpretation and the diversity of value. Through long-term understanding, exploration, and refinement of the medium itself, he constantly innovates, achieving a contemporary language transformation of lacquer art. Sun Wenjia's artistic creation and thinking are also integrated into China's current artistic media revolution.
Sun Wenjia's life is simple and quiet. He enjoys driving along the coastal roads of Fuzhou in his spare time, then camping in the mountains, brewing a pot of tea, sipping it while reading. His reading list covers literature, history, and philosophy; he does not limit himself to a particular theme, but continually enriches his mind through a varied reading experience.
To Sun Wenjia, art is like a grand symphony in life, each segment either soothing, melancholy, or passionate, and Sun Wenjia moves naturally along with its rhythm. Within painting, he strives to break free from the conventions of predecessors, creating original works and expressing personality; outside of art, he categorises, analyses, and debates with clarity of thought to convey his own reflections. The artist, with profound aspiration, seems like a bird, fluttering or soaring through mountains and forests. Song Tao, curator of "Returning to the Void and Entering the Whole," explains Sun Wenjia's artistic creation: "He has chosen lacquer as his medium, and his works present an Eastern sense of mystery combined with forms of contemporary sculpture and installation, making his approach unique among young artists. Highly sensitive to art and creation, they deeply understand how to combine the sensations of contemporary abstract art with historical narrative, uniting the spirit and material of the work as one."
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