Animator takes a cynical approach to history
Print Edition
ARTIST and filmmaker Sun Xun is somewhat of a history buff. He especially enjoys questioning history, something he learned from his father.
Sun’s latest film, “The Script,” that opened at Zeyi Theater in Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang Province, on June 7, is his first residency project beyond museum and gallery space.
The whole cinema looks like one big gallery. He says he painted the walls inside the cinema, where his sketches hung.
“The Script” is an artistic animated film to the very core with Sun filming it completely inside the cinema over the past two months.
“The reality is composed of various systems, structures and genres, such as the monument, the museum, the theater and the cinema,” says the 35-year-old Liaoning Province native. “Yet is it possible to create a new story, something out of an ordinary commercial cinema?
“The cinema could be a core construction system of another world, like a palace without a king. The cinema also acts as an avenue that allows people to see the world in new light, or form new perspectives in some way. Creating art in the cinema doesn’t mean destruction, but a new development.”
Sun says he grew up with a warped view of history. In school, he learned the official version of China’s past. But at home, his father, who worked in a factory and whose family had been adversely affected by the “cultural revolution (1966-76),” told Sun a different version of Chinese history.
“What is history?” he asks. “When all the concrete things in history have been removed for a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a year or even a century, there is nothing more real or exciting than questioning history itself rather than getting an answer from history.”
He admits this has shaped his cynical attitude toward history and society.
Sun says he was admitted to the middle school affiliated to the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, where students were exempted from a mathematics test. He then applied for the print department of the art academy after he heard that students there were free to create whatever they wanted.
From the very start, Sun says he chose animation because it was the only way to realize his dream of being an artist.
“My dean asked me to give up the artistic animations I was doing because they were different from the commercial animation films,” he says. “He told me I would not be chosen by film festivals nor earn money. He thought I was going in the wrong direction.”
Whether it has been fate, hard work, luck or a combination of all three, Sun has had a clear vision of his life and career at a younger age than his peers.
Upon graduation in 2005, Sun opened his animation studio. The following year he started applying to film festivals and learned that “renowned international film festivals just want good movies, whether it is commercial or artistic.”
His short animated films stand out because he is a stickler for tradition, insisting on hand-drawn sketches or wood printing to makes his films rather than the computer graphics that prevail in the industry.
He says wood printing is complicated, but the result is more “hysteric and violent.”
His films are stylistically very different from Japanese manga or the cartoons on cable television. They compare with the work of William Kentridge, a South African artist who has used hand-drawn realist animation to retell the violent history of his nation.
Both artists employ a line-drawn approach that harks back to 19th-century caricaturist Honoré Daumier or to the 18th century and William Hogarth, but with the addition of surrealist effects and, in Sun’s case, bright acid coloring.
His films have been screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (“Lie of Magician,” 2005), San Francisco International Film Festival (“People’s Republic of Zoo,” 2009) and the Venice Film Festival (“21G,” 2010). “21G” was first Chinese animated film to be selected by the Venice festival.
However, such recognition isn’t what drives him.
“I don’t consider this a special honor,” Sun says. “Actually participating in various film festivals, for me, is akin to having meals at the right time.
“Art is such a trivial thing in life, and has nothing to prove, let alone an artist,” he says. “Compared with politics or science, artists are not the decisive power in society.”
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