International Festival: Sun Xun

Mythos is a large-scale animated installation by Sun Xun (b. 1980, Fuxin, Liaoning, China), presented as part of There Is No ‘I’ in Team at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Newcastle and Gateshead. The exhibition brought together a generation of artists from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau whose practices engage with moving image, sound and installation, exploring questions of history, identity and collective experience.

In Mythos, Sun Xun constructs a shifting visual world in which time, myth, memory and historical reconstruction continually collide. Kings, magicians, empty chairs and engulfing flames emerge within a fragmented and constantly transforming narrative, creating an atmosphere in which fact and fiction become indistinguishable. Through layered imagery and animated sequences, the work evokes the instability of historical memory, suggesting how personal experience and collective histories can be continually rewritten, distorted and reimagined.

Drawing on traditional Chinese woodblock printing, ink painting and hand-drawn animation, Sun Xun approaches history as fragmented and unstable rather than fixed or authoritative. The work reflects his wider interest in cultural memory, historical trauma and the relationship between official histories and individual experience.