The Grudge-Bearer Never Rests
孫原 (SUN Yuan)
The Grudge-Bearer Never Rests
2021
Minifigures, red ball, robot arm installation
250 x 250 x 150 cm
Resentment is a complex and persistent emotion. Love and hate intermingled, one cannot bear to love but cannot stand to hate; in the expressions of a materialized world, one cannot possess but cannot let go, an unending, lingering hesitation. There might be occasional collisions, but what’s more is rather an orbital action, neither progressing nor retreating. Continually keeping each other on edge, they are thus full of vitality, unable to stop. Supposedly, the moon is a piece of the earth flung out during its orbit, but they have now been keeping a stable distance for millions of years, unable to unite, but so too, unable to separate.
Sun Yuan is an installation artist adept at challenging biases through overwhelming the senses with scathing criticism, installations of great scale or repetitive, violent aesthetics. For the “Digital Corporeality” exhibition, he has conceived of a small-scale work from scratch: three mechanical arms support a flat white paradise, with the audience seemingly on another plane, viewing from a bird’s-eye view the uncanny (weak) impact brought about by shaking. This new work furthers the artist’s continual artistic concern: critically examining specific ecological structures through various objects. Ecologies are complex systems that require the achievement of some continual and relatively stable state for their sustenance. In the middle of the platform in this work, the objects that seem not to participate in the action rather become important elements of this ecology — the red balls are controlled through their reaction to the mechanical arm, and the objects on the platform are comparatively complete, but yet somewhat brittle. The three mechanical arms seem to hint at an omnipresent surveillance system, or an even larger authority structure, reflecting thereby on our daily realities. Between stability and destruction, habitual adjustments, orbits, disturbances and compromises, will the ecological habitus of this platform be broken? And to what degree might it be broken?
Production Team
Concept: SUN Yuan
Executive production: LIN Hsieh-Min
Robot arm sponsor: HIWIN Technology Co., Ltd.
Initial design of equipment: CHEN Arau
Programming and software and hardware planning and execution: WANG Baixun
This work was remotely produced by the curatorial team in Taiwan
Artist description
Sun Yuan was born in Beijing in 1972, graduated from the High School Affiliated to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1991, and graduated from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. He currently lives and works in Beijing. Participated in solo and group exhibitions include "Emerging-China Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale" (2005), "Backbone: Eight Key Images of Chinese Art in the New Century" (2009), "Sydney", Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing Biennale-The Beauty of Distance: Singing Survived in Turbulent Times" (2010), "Thirteenth World House Project-Kassel Documenta" (2012), Guggenheim Museum of Art "New Stories" (2010) 2016), Qatar Museum Administration "How about art?—Contemporary Art from China" (2016), Guggenheim Museum of America, "World Theater—Art and China after 1989", (2017) and No. 58 The Venice Biennale "May you live in interesting times" (2019). He has won the CCAA China Contemporary Art Award Young Artist Award and Credit Suisse Today Art Award.