Sun Yitian Romantic Room, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
180,2 x 136,5 x 9 cm (framed)
The painting of a sleeping woman, Romantic Room, has an exaggerated artificiality, invoking a fairy-tale like scenario with a menacing demon crouching next to the slumbering princess figure. An ominous note mingles with the picture’s ostensible sweetness. To the artist, the motif is both personal in its reference to the romantic narratives communicated to young women, as well as a comment about a broader phenomenon, namely being caught in a dream-like world of objects and all-encompassing narratives that mediate experiences.
Sun Yitian's work is drawing on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum, who theorized in the 1980s that simulations of an idealized world such as Disneyworld concealed the real world's artificiality. At the same time, it is also the artist's exploration of Western art and her experiences of Chinese representations of Western aesthetics that fuel her most recent works. A central concern of her paintings is to highlight the transformation that visual culture and narratives undergo in a globalized world.
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