Two Headed Dragon

Although the objects depicted in this set of diptychs are plastic inflatable toys from childhood, the artist’s brushwork enables the work to glow with vivid textures through the realistic rendering of light and shadow and accented highlights. When creating the work, the artist would first look for cheap toys from various sources, including online shops, wholesale warehouses, roadside vendors, and scrap yards. Then she would build a scene to place the toys to form the composition. During the long painting sessions, she would laboriously depict these cheap toys with extremely fine brushstrokes. In this diptych, the artist advances her perspective to enlarge a certain detail to elicit an abstract visual sensation, which becomes one panel of the diptych. The crude and the delicate, the real and the unreal are transformed in this moment.

Behind the work is Sun Yitian’s tribute to the industrial era. These small toys were originally commodities in the Yiwu market, but through her intervention, their value and identity as commodities are presented anew. She does not tell you the metaphorical meanings behind them, but you will find them interesting, and they will make you think. As the artist says: “There is no singular answer. I rarely presuppose which meaning they will point to.”