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Sun Liang:Reminisce and Resist
By ArtZineChina print

un Liang’s representative oil paintings were almost all completed in his small studio at People’s Square in Shanghai. After moving to his new studio at Xinzhuang in Minhang District in 2006, Sun Liang experienced two years of ‘artist’s block’. During these two years, besides working on traditional Chinese painting, printmaking and making some installations, Sun never touched an oil paint brush. He was unable to get adjusted to his new surroundings. He kept reminiscing on the past and resisting the present.

Sun Liang was born in 1957, in Hangzhou and spent his teen years in Fuzhou. He was already a junior school student when he moved to Shanghai with his family.

In the 1980s, a wave of humanism and a dynamic, ideological liberation movement, which perished before success, had spread throughout the country. The special history wave marked clearly in Sun’s works, who was a teacher in Art Academy of Shanghai University then.

Since the 1990s, the literary subject gradually disappeared in Sun’s works. Such paintings as, “Ofelia”, “Salome”, and “Birdy” had totally reformed the traditional narrative mode, showing a “Sun Liang style” of art language to the public. Sun therefore won his early international reputation. In the late 1990s, which was also the purely abstract period and diffusion (according to the artist himself) period of his art career, Sun create a Utopian atmosphere of illusion and a world of completely aestheticism in his works. After that, his works returned to the concrete style. He persuaded an incomparable delicacy——which could hardly be found in abstract works——and focused on the details. With such an oriental mentality, the attractiveness of oil painting——which originally came from the western world, was raised into a new level. After the year of 2002, with the experience of jade-carving, Sun started to explore the experimental materials, and stepped up to a creating period of diversity.

His work progress is very slow. He makes his own canvas as he is never satisfied with the ready-made ones. Usually, he will first buy the cloth, dividing them into groups, apply 5 to 6 layers of glue water to the cloth, and use a light color to finish up the base. Perhaps this is also the reason why the colors in his artworks are very fine and delicate.

While creating his art work, Sun listens to music, radio or even switch on the television. Sometimes, he might take a little nap, or have lunch with friends then come back to continue his creation. To him, creating an art piece is not a task or a career, but a form of self expression. The shlf-pureness appears during the process of creating art works. This is what he really wants to achieve.

Below are pictures taken in Sun Liang's studio in Min Hang Distreect:























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