Sun Yitian Little Painter, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
205 x 158 cm (80 3/4 x 62 1/4 in)
Sun Yitian's Little Painter employs the artist's characteristic vocabulary of toy-like consumer objects as stand-in for a semi-autobiographical work about the role of the artist.
She adopts as metaphor a retro cartoon bear—manufactured in China in the 1980s for export to Europe—casting it in the role of an “artist” holding painting tools, thereby symbolically affirming her own artistic identity. The bear’s childlike, playful appearance stands in stark contrast to the implements of art-making, deconstructing the notion of the sublime or heroic associated with artistic creation. By representing herself as a toy bear, Sun Yitian alludes to her feeling of insignificance and her desire to overcome it.
The stacked catalogues on Agnes Martin and Gerhard Richter pay homage to and enter into dialogue with the authority of art history, while the inclusion of her own catalogue among them poses an active challenge to the question of who gains admission into art history.
The painting is the artist’s exploration of the construction of artistic identity, the genealogy of art history, and the subjectivity of creation: The deployment of hyperrealist technique—balancing the “seriousness” of painterly skill against the “banality” of the subject—underscores a critical logic of de-sublimation and anti-authoritarianism. Why is the bear crying, and why does it keep painting even as it cries?
She adopts as metaphor a retro cartoon bear—manufactured in China in the 1980s for export to Europe—casting it in the role of an “artist” holding painting tools, thereby symbolically affirming her own artistic identity. The bear’s childlike, playful appearance stands in stark contrast to the implements of art-making, deconstructing the notion of the sublime or heroic associated with artistic creation. By representing herself as a toy bear, Sun Yitian alludes to her feeling of insignificance and her desire to overcome it.
The stacked catalogues on Agnes Martin and Gerhard Richter pay homage to and enter into dialogue with the authority of art history, while the inclusion of her own catalogue among them poses an active challenge to the question of who gains admission into art history.
The painting is the artist’s exploration of the construction of artistic identity, the genealogy of art history, and the subjectivity of creation: The deployment of hyperrealist technique—balancing the “seriousness” of painterly skill against the “banality” of the subject—underscores a critical logic of de-sublimation and anti-authoritarianism. Why is the bear crying, and why does it keep painting even as it cries?