SUN XUN

ShanghART Gallery is honoured to present Sun Xun’s solo exhibition Palimpsestes on 29^th August to 5^th October 2014. The exhibition showcases 23 paintings from the Palimpsestes collection created by Sun Xun from 2013–2014. It is a series of illustration, painted directly on tree barks, presenting the idea that the existence of a story unfolds before the creation of paper.

‘Palimpsestes’ is the Latin word for the first primeval book made from goatskin which words were inked, scraped off its content and re-written or painted again, in doing so, destruction and continuity appears to exist on the same medium.

The repetitive process of writing and erasing seems to be a metaphor of a story dissolving into eternality, as the same story becomes part of another narrative and moving into annals of history contemporaneously.

Sun Xun’s main artistic practice of an animated film is presented in a different but similar framework in this series, expanding his narrative creation in various approaches comparable to a dictionary, drama or a monument. These oeuvre reflects the artist’s rumination on the past, present and being in the moment, as well as his explorations and experimentation of the multifarious narrative medium.