“Prediction Laboratory is a narration fulfilled ex post facto. Art is only employed to be coerced, and that is the complot of art realities with the future world. Caught between the past and the future, every individual is a spy who purloins information from life, filling the ravine between memories and prophecies with souls.”
– Sun Xun
Yuz Museum is glad to present the second solo exhibition of artist Sun Xun at museums in China, “Prediction Laboratory”, from November 19, 2016, which is curated by New York based art critic and independent curator Barbara Pollack. This exhibition will be open to the public from November 19, 2016 to January 15, 2017.
Born in 1980, Fuxin, a northeast city in China, Sun Xun’s works blur the lines between drawing, painting, animation and installation and incorporate a wide array of techniques, including woodcuts, traditional Chinese ink and charcoal drawings. He keeps inventing new ways to challenge our beliefs in ostensible truths and convincing lies, creating surreal stories that can be read as allegories for political events and historic accounts.
Sun Xun’s “Prediction Laboratory” is a select space for investigation and experimentation rather than a straightforward museum exhibition that delivers answers and conclusions. The exhibition will start from a site-specific painting by the artist at the entrance. Having already completed 21 films, Sun Xun has chosen to share 12 animations on this occasion. Ranging from the artworks which he made while still a student to the more recent one in 2014, these films convey the artist’s major themes and imagery while working in a wide variety of mediums. Sun Xun has created an all-encompassing environment, with a tunnel of light and sound playing 12 animations simultaneously, leading to a pseudo-laboratory where scientific experiments may or may not be underway.
In the second part of the exhibition, we emerge into a space appropriating the look of a scientist’s study. In the gallery, Sun Xun will present weird taxonomies inspired by natural history museums. The artist will also create another on-site painting in this gallery and will leave the audience one suspense of the theme. For Sun Xun, who believes that history is a lie, science is a lie and art itself is the biggest lie, “Prediction Laboratory” is his most acute analysis of the conventions of knowledge with the artist taking liberties with traditional means for attaining facts. In creating the laboratory, Sun Xun is proposing an alternative modernity, one that questions utopian agendas and the benefits of scientific progress. “Prediction Laboratory” is the summation of a career that the artist has been spent challenging official histories and creating alternative narratives.
