Exhibition: 1rd June to 31st August 2012
Maddox Arts is pleased to present Sun Daliang: Diary From A Lonely Island. This exhibition marks Sun’s first solo show outside China.
Thirteen years ago, when Sun Daliang decided to forego modern Chinese life to live on Jiang Xin, part of a remote archipelago in the middle of Yangtze river, he was unaware of the spiritual journey that awaited him there. An isolated life on this mysterious island free of society’s pressures’ would come to reform his philosophical thinking, his commitment to life as well as his painting style.
In ‘Red Shoes’ Daliang’s sensuous brush strokes serve as the mark of the deep subconscious workings that underpin his work. The canvas becomes a map charting the distance his mind wandered during the self-imposed exile on Jiang Xin, his paintings act as a diary record of this time unearthing the concealed desires he brought with him to the island. With his imagination unbound, the object of Daliang’s attention return to his adolescent tropes, namely his obsession with a girl that caught his eye during his years at art school. Her painted figure illuminates his work as she returns offering her company and tantalizing his desires.
“Years of meditation in solitude on my dark island, where my favored companions were books on alchemy, Buddhism and existentialism, have increased my spiritual power,” claims Sun. Indeed, the still life paintings with their enigmatic, recondite air are reflections of the visions induced by prolonged periods of meditation. Comparable to the hallucinatory phenomenon of the ‘Prisoner’s Cinema’, Daliang channels these waking dreams into his work allowing us a glimpse in to the nebulae of his subconscious.
Although Sun’s inspiration primarily derives from the solipsism of isolation the rapid changes currently occurring in Chinese cultural life have inevitably impacted a number of his works, notably, ‘The Boy’. This transient era of shifting values is viewed with some apprehension in the artist’s eye as he cannot help but see the contradictions implicit in a peaceful mind and a fast growing economy.