2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition

Tianyi Sun’s transdisciplinary practice and research reimagine the ambivalent boundaries between data, narrative, document, and experience. She is interested in the disembodied consciousness that exists within digital spaces of precariousness and preservation. As the body navigates between analog and digital spaces there is an alluring fantasy of a subjectivity freed from the constraints of biology and physics, but simultaneously it inevitably is exposed, leaking, circulating, deteriorating.

Through interweaving painting, film, sound, and programming within interactive installations, she ruptures linear syntax and perspective to mine and reconfigure the processes in which subjective experience is encoded, re-coded, disseminated, and in turn, interpreted. The “I” is moved in and out unpredictably, stumbling, fluctuating, grounding a singular experience within the existence of repeated others. She invites the viewer to ask questions: who is speaking, documenting, navigating? By interrogating the relationship between the ephemeral nature of information and the persistence for evidence and communication, she excavates alternative encounters within archival schemas to engage emotion and sense-perception as modes of reclaiming a moving, feeling body. The “I” becomes self and other, narrator and reader, singular and collective.

Tianyi Sun (b.1996) is currently living and working between New York, Los Angeles, and Beijing.