The First Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

CHINA SUN LIANG Leopard letter 1992 Oil on fabric 110x 110cm Collection: The artist Sun Liang was born in 1957 in Hangzhou, China. In 1982 he graduated from the Institute for Light Technology, Shanghai, and then worked at the Shanghai Parks and Gardens College until 1986. He now teaches at the School of Art, Shanghai University. Sun Liang has exhibited in many group shows including 'Art Today', Shanghai, 1988; 'China Avant- garde', Beijing, 1989; 'Modern Chinese Art Today', Tokyo, Japan, 1989; 'Garage Art', Shanghai, 1991; 'Encountering the Others', Kassel, Germany, 1992; and the 'Venice Biennale', Italy, 1993. Sun Liang is represent- ed in the collection of the Tokyo Gallery, Japan. The work of Sun Liang is multi-layered. Despite having chosen oil painting as his 62 primary medium of expression, the influence that traditional Chinese brush and ink painting and jade carving has exerted on his practice can still be discerned. His early oil paintings, executed in an expressionist style, explore myths associated with love and death. Through the use of title and symbolic imagery, his work is imbued with an epic quality. In late 1991 Sun Liang's art began to change. He gradually eliminated the sombre and tragic mood that had suffused his earlier paintings, cast aside heavy and cumbersome compositions and abandoned narrative structure. He began to explore the concept of weightlessness and created compositions that were not constrained by the canvas. The formal hierarchical relationship between objects was removed and objects and figures in the process of transformation and osmosis were imposed, one on top of another, to create a strange and illusory space. Sun Liang's recent paintings may be characterised as explorations of the fantastic, though they are not devoid of an aesthetic dimension. They are not unlike the popular traditional Chinese gongbi or meticulous style paintings, in which objects are depicted using bold colour and fine, carefully executed brushstrokes. Sun Liang has stated: I am critical of Western art that postdates the Renaissance, for in general the development of perspective has made us lazy and has hindered the evolution of visual culture. Image creation has been overlooked and it is this that I intend to examine. Sun Liang is a creator of images who chooses residents for his own 'Garden of Eden'. It is his aim to free up the pictorial field by breaking down the stiffness and solidity of forms. This is not only a form of artistic revelation, it is also the ultimate aim of myth-making. Li Xu