Monday 21 September 2015

Sun Ji All That Is Solid Melts Into Air Photo Collages of Buildings and Cityscapes

Sun Ji, a Shanghai-born artist whose photo collages suggest a nuanced view of the city’s past and present. A curator says the 29-year-old artist’s two-part “Memory City” series is “part cubist collage and part hyperreal landscape.” In one work from his “Memory City I” series, Sun juxtaposes black-and-white photographs of factories, smokestacks, and industrial errata. Glimpsed from across an art gallery, the kitchen-window-sized collage resembles a real photograph. But move closer, and the skewed lines of perspective and improbably dense arrangement of buildings reveal a whimsical critique of China’s late-twentieth-century economic “miracle.”