The Schbor Gallery is honored to announce that it will hold a solo exhibition of Sun Yitian, "Romantic Room", at the Berlin space, featuring a series of new paintings. This is the artist's third solo exhibition since joining the gallery in 2023. The previous two were presented at the gallery's Paris space and the Niche space in Berlin respectively.
Sun Yitian is good at depicting various mass-produced items in his paintings. Inflatable toys and severed doll heads are common themes among them. Her works are usually based on the photos she took herself and delicately presented with bright and saturated acrylic paint. The exhibition "Romantic House" continues Sun Yitian's multi-level exploration of the essence and possibilities of images in contemporary painting. The works on display interweave the artist's personal experiences with the changing context of Chinese social culture through the visual vocabulary of China and the translated forms of Western culture in Chinese daily life.
In her new work, Sun Yitian not only references classic visual elements from art history such as schemas, consumer goods and toys, and amusement parks, but also integrates his personal childhood memories and acute observations of urban daily life.
The exhibition "Romantic House" particularly focuses on images that draw on the themes of religious semiotics and art history. Within the grand composition, multiple perspectives, cultural imprints, and even connections with time and space are simultaneously suspended. These works are full of mysterious beauty, and the appeal within them is based on the audience's natural cognition of certain images. The angelic child holding a pomegranate branch or the hooker gazing at the statue of the Virgin Mary with a mobile phone seem to evoke people's associations with Christianity, but in fact, behind it lies the artist's exploration of the essential meaning of the image. The children in the picture are both like angels and propaganda posters from the period of China's one-child policy, with images of prayer and education placed. The Virgin Mary statue might actually be a mass-produced Guanyin statue. The ingenious composition of the picture pays tribute to Diego Velasquez's "Las Meninas" (1656) through the perspectives of Edouard Manet and Jeff Wall.
Another important reference of the exhibition is the concept of "shanzhai", which the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls "Chinese-style deconstruction". It is an act of re-creation through appropriation and an original concept different from the Western tradition. In this context, Sun Yitian's bold eclecticism becomes the core of her creation, meticulously constructing complex visual jigsaw puzzles that combine the architectural backgrounds of Italian Renaissance masterpieces with the heads of dolls. Or make a visual comparison between the children's animations played on the old television sets of parents' generation and Henri Matisse's "Dance" (1909). Sun Yitian has adapted, reorganized and reconstructed the image spectrum spanning the East and the West, depicting his own unique narrative with diverse visual vocabularians, confident and without any timidity.
Sun Yitian's observations on the reproduction of Western fairy tales in Chinese theme parks have also been transformed into typical images highlighting the evolution of visual culture and narrative in the context of globalization in this creation. These personal memories are deeply rooted in the grand cultural and political background of China. Especially during the artist's teenage years, she witnessed the economic boom of her hometown. Wenzhou is an industrial manufacturing capital known for cheap consumer goods, toys and brand imitations. Those inflatable castles and brightly colored small toys that occupy an important position in her memories not only evoke the pure sense of wonder and power in her childhood, It also reflects that consumerism and commodity iteration, which have driven China's wealth accumulation, have had a profound impact on the global economy. This tension is ingeniously presented by placing specific items in an exotic landscape. Strange plants suggest foreignness, and those dramatic skies of deep blue, deep purple or rose, along with the lightning-cut twilight or the hazy moonlight before dawn, create a transcendent and calm atmosphere, as if foreshadowing the approaching of some kind of transformation.
The deliberately enhanced aesthetic appeal and intense allure in Sun Yitian's works are designed to draw the audience into a surreal and delightful artificial illusion. The work of the same name as the exhibition, "Romantic Room" (2025), creates a fairy-tale-like scene with an extreme sense of pretense. The image of a sleeping woman is like the sleeping beauty in a fairy tale, but beside her lies a hideous demon. For artists, it points both to the romantic fairy tales instilled in young women and to a broader critique of the dreams woven together by consumer goods and grand narratives. Sun Yitian's works imply the blurred boundary between reality and fiction, and she attempts to awaken our awareness of the real world, even though she herself is not sure whether this reality still exists or is still possible to exist.
