The Secret Life of Animals
Ms. Sun is a visual artist living in Queens, New York. She works in acrylic on canvas and paper. In her work, she explores the secret and emotional lives of animals through painting and drawing. Her work has been exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery, Alliance of Queens Artists, Art-O-Mat, Bayside Historical Society, Callahan Gallery (St. Francis College), Citigroup Court Square Atrium, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Elderfields Preserve, Elmont Public Library, Flushing Town Hall, Great Neck Arts Center, Joseph P. Addabbo Federal Building, Judson Memorial Church, Juvenal Reis Experimental Space, Heritage Museum of Epirus, Lafayette Grill, Lazarus Gallery (United Hebrew), LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Life Space, Local Project, Queens Museum of Art, Space Realty Group, Amelia A. Wallace Gallery (SUNY Old Westbury), and Women's Studio Center. Her paintings are also in private collections in New York City, NY; Washington, D.C.; Savannah, GA; and London, UK.
Ms. Sun has attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Women's Studio Center in Long Island City, NY, Rockland Community College, NY, and Great Neck Arts Center, Great Neck, NY.
Artist Statement
I paint the Secret Lives of Animals--seeking the emotional moment between animals and ourselves. I create intuitively, without photographs, directly onto canvas using saturated acrylic color, vibrant lines that shade into abstraction, and careful compositions of body posture and facial expression. My work often plays with dimensionality: many paintings have both "flat" and "three-dimensional" elements in the same piece for aesthetic reasons. My art has a narrative quality and there are stories, sometimes factual, sometimes fictional, behind each image. Throughout art history, animals have been largely depicted in clinically biological terms, or for symbolic or metaphorical purposes. I am interested in exploring animals as individual sentient beings, as unique personalities with their own distinct animal essences.
My love of animals began in childhood where I read and watched everything I could about them from television documentaries to animal encyclopedias to fictional stories. As animals in the wild have become increasingly isolated, refugees in their own lands, and marginalized by human development, I feel a deep urgency to tell their hidden stories -- to transform them from alien/outsiders to fellow inhabitants who deserve their place on our precious planet.
Origins
Fond of drawing as a child, Ms. Sun remembers drawing roosters in crayon that brought admiration from adults. She was inspired by tales of animals in Aesop's fables, Greek mythology, and in children's classics like Watership Down, Black Beauty, Trumpet of the Swan, and many others. Although she has worked as a lawyer and as an instructor of English literature, she always maintained a deep and abiding interest in the natural world. She now devotes her energy and thoughts to her art. Her paintings are not derived from photographs, but come from the inner sight of her imagination and reflect forms arising from intuition. She is especially interested in the negative space that surrounds her animals--the line or edge where the animate touches the inanimate.
A profound love of animals informs Ms. Sun's work with a sense of nature's spirituality and grace. She depicts an emotional reality that emphasizes each animal's emanating spirit. In each work, she creates a unique moment: a pictorial-narrative center that tempts the viewer to wonder what has happened or will happen to the beings in her work. A slightly whimsical sensibility allows viewers to play and come up with their own solutions to complete the story.
Cultural heritage
As a first-generation Chinese-American, my reverence for animals began at an early age when I was told that I was born in the year of the Tiger.
I soon learned that everyone is born into an animal year on the Chinese zodiac and is believed to possess traits that reflect that animal’s “personality.”
As a Tiger, I was supposed to be courageous, passionate, and obstinate -- qualities that I certainly recognized in myself -- and this early identification led to an awareness that, as humans beings, we share many of the emotional qualities and feelings of the animals on this planet.
Throughout the centuries, Chinese art is permeated with animals in painting, sculpture, and poetry as talismans, symbols, metaphors, and allusions.
This animal-conscious heritage has informed and inspired my desire to make animals the focus of my art.
My painting also draws upon the practice of Chinese calligraphy in which the artist enters a meditative state to make characters freely with fresh and simple strokes. In my art, I apply paint directly onto the canvas; there is no sketching of the image first or underdrawing. I have painted and drawn this way since childhood and believe that this calligraphic sensibility enables me to create animal images that are immediate, of the moment, and expressive of emotional content.
Panel
Moderator, Asian American Bar Association of New York
"Celebrating Asian Pacific American Women's Heritage Through the Arts" on May 10, 2011
Dewey & LeBoeuf, 1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY
