10 Questions with Sun Kun
Sun Kun is an artist and spatial designer. Influenced from an early age by his father, he fell in love with painting, which brought him great spiritual comfort and enriched his life with art. He worked as a spatial designer for twelve years, during which time he opened his own design studio for six years, but he still felt that painting gave him a sense of fulfillment. He then gradually turned to paint to continue his childhood dream.
He joined AAA (Asian Art Association of Singapore) in July 2022, IAVA (International Association of Visual Artists) in November 2022, and RSA (Royal Society of Arts) in November 2022.
Participated in numerous art exhibitions around the world, including Tower Bridge, London, UK; The Armory, Venice, Italy; The Ostrovsky State Museum, Moscow, Russia; The World Trade Centre, Taipei, China; The Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang, China, to name a few.
He has also collaborated with several brands in a variety of industry sectors.
Sun Kun - Portrait
ARTIST STATEMENT
The universe is made up of elementary particles, which are the basis for the variety of objects that make it up. Smaller and smaller scales of distance reveal a more fundamental view of nature; that is, if we can understand and describe the smallest scale, we can understand the largest scale. All our memories are like dreams, both real and unreal, and will become both clear and blurred through time. Each brushstroke in a painting is the smallest particle of the work, each grain of sand that makes up the universe and each point of our memory. The countless particles may not have much meaning or value when they stand alone, like a microcosm; it is only when they are distanced and viewed in the macrocosm that the whole can be seen.
Teenage Dreams, Digital Hand Painting, 100x200 cm, 2023 © Sun Kun
INTERVIEW
First of all, tell us a little more about your background and how did you begin making art?
My father was an amateur painter, and through his influence, I fell in love with drawing as a child. Whether in class or at home, I loved to scribble on paper or whatever. Looking at the patterns or images I created gave me a sense of mental comfort, and my drawings were passed around to my classmates, whose praise was my initial motivation to draw. At university, I studied art and design, mainly environmental art, and after graduating, I worked in interior design for twelve years. But working in design was not my ambition; although it solved the consumption of food, clothing, and shelter, for me, design work was just a job. When the 2019 epidemic happened, I realised that if I didn't do what I really wanted to do in time, it might be too late tomorrow. So I picked up my paintbrush again and continued my childhood dream.
You work both with digital painting. How did you choose this medium?
It was around 1998, when I was about 14 years old that I heard about digital boards through comic magazines, so I asked my parents to buy a Chinese brand digital board, and since then, I have been drawing with a digital board combined with a personal computer, but at that time it was just an experiment, and nothing good came out of it, and because of the time that has passed, nothing remains from that period.
Dream, Digital Hand Painting, 100x100 cm, 2022 © Sun Kun
Stars of the Universe, Digital Hand Painting, 200x200 cm, 2023 © Sun Kun
Can you tell us about the process of creating your work? What aspect of your work do you pay particular attention to?
The first half of the work is as simple as traditional painting, first defining the large blocks of colour and structure, then abandoning traditional painting of the details and moving on to the details of the particles. The key point is to control the relationship between the colour of each spiral shape and the whole.
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
Most of the themes in my work come from my dreams, which I have almost every night and in which I experience strange and unusual things. When I wake up, I record what I find interesting and then either recreate it through painting or use it as a basis for my paintings. The use of colour is particularly important in my work, as the world is full of colour and it is only natural to add it to the picture, and a colourful picture is also more relevant to the dream.
Your works are very intricate and have lots of details. How much planning goes into each artwork?
In terms of painting time, each painting takes a different amount of time depending on its size, with smaller pieces taking around two days and larger pieces taking three to five days. One of the advantages of painting digitally is that we don't have to worry about the paint drying, so we can paint right through to completion.
Untouchable Lovers, Digital Hand Painting, 60x42 cm, 2022 © Sun Kun
You also seem to use pink and purple quite often. What do these colors represent for you? And why did you choose them in the first place?
I like other shades too, but using pinks and purples can make me feel like I am still in a dream world and gives a romantic atmosphere. When using colour I would try to avoid black and then replace it with other colours because I think black is heavy and black is only suitable for serious subjects. This is, of course, my personal opinion and does not represent the usual meaning that colour brings to people.
Do you have a role model that you've drawn inspiration from when creating your art?
When I was a student, I loved the way the Impressionists and Fauves used colour, and if anything has influenced my idea of colour, it must be the work of these schools of painting described above. In my work, in a sense, the colours of each brushstroke remain separate, which makes each brushstroke like a particle of the universe, which is both the smallest component and, at the same time, has its own details.
As you are working with digital painting, are you also working with NFTs? And what is your take on this subject?
My work has been licensed to a number of digital collection platforms and will continue to generate collaborations in the metaverse and offline physical realm. Online collaborations for digital artworks seem logical, but I don't limit myself to collaborations in the digital realm, as digital painting has been around for decades, not just now, and I think digital paintings can have the same uses as traditional paintings, including but not limited to the collecting realm.
The Girl with Bunny Ears, Digital Hand Painting, 100x100 cm, 2023 © Sun Kun
The Virtual Man's Dream, Digital Hand Painting, 100x100 cm, 2022 © Sun Kun
What are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?
Now that my life is almost entirely focused on art, design work has slowly faded from my life. The style of my work is quite unique at the moment, but I think it is still in its early stages, and I hope that in the future, it will become a truly transgressive existence. In the future, I will also do more things that focus on artistic exploration of what is the meaning of our human existence and what makes us different from artificial intelligence. I don't know what it takes to be a true artist, I've always called myself an artistic creator, but I hope that at the end of my life, I can have the title artist engraved on my tombstone.
And finally, how do you see your art evolving in the next five years?
Five years is not a short time, and maybe in five years, my style will change. Maybe I will experiment with more art forms other than painting, and maybe I will create a really new style and a new meaning. I don't know what the future will look like, but the future has to get better and better. In fact, my goal in life now is to seek the meaning of my existence in the world, and it just happens to be through the field of art that I find it, and hopefully, in five years, I'll be able to say to my present self: you're doing a good job.
