Mandy Zhang Art is excited to announce Bruises, Can Sun’s inaugural solo exhibition in the UK, and the first showcase in our new gallery space at 16 Seymour Place, London, W1H 7NG. Launching on the 12th of April 2024, Bruises will feature Sun's latest series of evocative photography works, complemented by his latest sculptures, marking a significant debut for both the artist and our newly established gallery.
A subtle degree of cruelty circulates in Can Sun’s work. Far from violent, this cruelty is delicate and tender, measured yet taut; it exists in the photographs as an underlying atmosphere - like the pooling of blood that accompanies a bruise. Cruelty, in these works, mediates the absurdity of the world and the playfulness with which Sun creates his compositions. Stay for a moment with this cruelty, and you will start to sense pain, insecurity, love, and desire, all entangled with one another.
Something fragile takes place in the photographed scenes: an ephemeral equilibrium destined to collapse; a precarious structure held together by objects that are about to break down. Fragility intensifies in the juxtaposition of irreconcilable elements - soft and sharp, cold and warm, flesh and metal - which do not cancel each other out but enact a poignant paradox, one that feels cruel because of the fragility it instantiates.
No harm is intended here, but harm is inevitable, as it has always been, whether you like it or not; hence bruises - the trace left by an injury whose cause is not always clear. This seems to be at the heart of life’s absurdity composed within and represented by Sun’s richly metaphoric works, which we can tentatively relate to the artist’s family history, or the Chinese society in which he grew up, or both. Sun assembles a visual language capable of producing the texture of life’s absurdity as well as rhyming, playing, and dancing with it. As a result, we are transported from the realm of harm to an ongoing scene of bruises that includes pain, contingency, comedy, hope, and romance.
The sense of cruelty gets redoubled in the move between mediums, as the sculpturally composed scenes become condensed and dramatised in the space occupied by the photographic image, which now constitutes the theatrical space where the drama plays out. And drama it is, despite the calmness of the photographic image. This is a drama of temporal demand on your attention to life’s absurdity. Not harm per se, mind you, but the cruel recognition that harm is a precondition of life and one has to live with it.
