Sun Guojuan occupies a singular place in the development of Chinese contemporary art. Her trajectory never followed the dominant currents of avant-garde experimentation, but unfolded slowly, alongside them, in a language entirely her own. She grew up in an unusual family: her grandfather migrated from Korea to China in the 1920s and became one of the founders of the Republic of Korea; her father belonged to China’s earliest generation of aviation engineers and pilots, while her mother was deeply rooted in China. This heroic,cross-border genealogy did not shape her through ideology, but seeped into her life like an atmosphere—a quiet dignity, a romantic idealism, a sincerity as clear as light, and an ability to understand the world through tone and mood rather than assertion.

 

 

Installation View at “Sun Guojuan: Her Own Self”, CGK, Kunming, 2025

Although today’s global art world often interprets “identity” through postcolonial discourse—emphasizing marginality, otherness, and the lingering structures of colonial power—Sun Guojuan’s life unfolded through almost the opposite paradigm. Her sense of belonging emerged not from exclusion but from inclusion within a broad socialist world, where images, values, and emotional vocabularies flowed between “brotherly countries.” In this context, her Korean background was not marginalized but gently idealized—a soft difference easily absorbed into the language of internationalist friendship. Even when she felt her own distinctness, it existed within a framework that embraced rather than suppressed it. Seen from today, her work quietly steps away from that political imaginary, turning toward the sensory, the personal, and the unguarded, revealing how affinities among people are shaped as much by political paradigms as by heritage.

 

 

Installation View at “Sun Guojuan: Her Own Self”, CGK, Kunming, 2025

Within this context, her artistic sensitivity grew directly out of this sense of “difference.” While many of her contemporaries entered the avant-garde through ideology, theory, or academy training, Sun’s modernity emerged from emotional inwardness, cultural blending, and a finely tuned perception of daily life. As a child, during moments of upheaval, she often whispered to herself, “Me, I’m not the same as you.” This inwardness did not remove her from reality—it became her way of taking it in. For this reason, even though her path diverged from dominant trends, she repeatedly appeared in the histories of the ’85 New Wave and later in discussions of women’s art—because her practice offered another possibility for artistic transformation during the reform era.

 

 

Installation View at “Sun Guojuan: Her Own Self”, CGK, Kunming, 2025

Her early still-life paintings, later installations, and long-term photographic practice did not grow from manifestos or academic systems, but from personal memory, sensitivity to materials, and an instinctive feminine intuition. In this sense, she forms a “parallel modernity” within Chinese art—responding to collective transformations not with rupture or theory but with intimacy, vulnerability, and autobiography. Her work expands the scope of contemporary art to include not only critique and conceptual structures, but also the slow sedimentation of inner life.

Her Own Self — Sun Guojuan traces how each turning point in her life brought about a shift in her artistic language. The objects she has preserved—clothes, books, private photographs, personal belongings—form her own archive of family history and artistic memory. Together with the works, they form the emotional structure of the exhibition. The North Korean film fragments in the exhibition are not explanations of her work, but a background and an echo, returning us to her earliest aesthetic experiences: sincerity, idealism, an emotional transparency. They form a soft yet continuous cultural thread running through her practice.

 

 

Installation View at “Sun Guojuan: Her Own Self”, CGK, Kunming, 2025

About the Artist

Sun Guojuan, born in Kunming, Yunnan in 1959, is a contemporary female artist. She began her artistic career in 1984, studying under artist Mao Xuhui and planning a series of exhibitions on contemporary female art in Yunnan.

Her major solo exhibitions include: “Past Scenery, Youth, and Works – Early Works of Sun Guojuan” at Beijing Erzhi Art Museum in 2019; “Night Flight: Solo Exhibition of Sun Guojuan” at Shanghai Hong’er Art Space in 2012; “Beautiful Elegy: Works of Sun Guojuan” at Beijing 99 Qiyi Gallery in 2011; “Cool Autumn: Solo Exhibition of Sun Guojuan 1984-2007” at Beijing Ni Gallery in 2007; “Beautiful Elegy: Solo Exhibition of Sun Guojuan” at ARTSIDE Gallery in Seoul, South Korea in 2002, among others.

About the Curator

Anna Novikova is a curator at Contemporary Gallery Kunming, a lecturer in art history at Yunnan University, and a co-founder of the Gaodi Art Center.

She began her curatorial career at the Onegin Gallery in St. Petersburg in 2009. She has previously served as a curator at the Aviva Art Museum in Kunming and as the art director of the 1903space Gallery.