Delighted to share Sun Xun’s upcoming presentation in the group exhibition, ‘Clouds Stretching for a Thousand Miles: Ink in Asian Art’. The works on view are from Asia Society Museum’s new acquisitions of contemporary ink and calligraphic art. These contemporary works, displayed alongside two illuminated Qur’ans from China and Central Asia, reveal the innovative use of ink and calligraphy in visual expression, from the thirteenth century to the present, across Asia and the diaspora.

Sun Xun considers the residual impact of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese society and the subjective nature of history in his oeuvre. On view, his video ‘Time Vivarium’ (2015), set to an instrumental soundtrack by Mahler, alludes to the cacophony of China’s recent past through symbolic imagery including real and mythical animals that inhabit an expressionist landscape evocative of Song-dynasty landscape paintings.