Ke Sun is an illustrator and visual designer whose experimental works include watercolor, acrylic, digital paintings, 3D animation, and video installations.
She draws on personal, collective, and cultural memory and experiences, and applies a multidisciplinary visual language to communicate and expose core themes of nostalgia and the search for spiritual and cultural renewal amid the contradictions of modernity - most specifically, the pandemic reality.
Lost and gone were the past scenes
Like a white pony’s shadow across a ravine
Only in dreams can I still remember
What I’ve been yearning for and seeking
Someone asked
You are lonely, aren’t you?
No reply did I give, except that I do miss my home
The beaches and the trails in the parks
The scent of grass in the small courtyard--
It is everything in nature that I dearly miss
Digital images keep absorbing my soul
Plunging me into nothingness
Which I use all my might to resist--
I could only accept them as a dream
Here I want to find a habitat for my soul
Figuring out what has been missed
And what I have been yearning for
Returning to the most natural state
And waking up from the dream
Let nostalgia lead me to the future
Where I will find my belonging
The forgotten
And most primitive
Home
'To be homesick and to be sick of being at home-occasionally at the same time.'(Glenn Albrecht, 2005) It sounds contradictory, but it is also the present that we are experiencing. Where is the home we are looking for? What is our spiritual longing? With the pandemic, our lives have changed dramatically. Digital virtual spaces have taken over our social life. Will contemporary nostalgia be affected by technology, and what kind of nostalgia will it present?
‘Nostalgia Echo’ focuses on this personal and collective yearning in the creation of anxious scenes of both nostalgia and imagination. My audio-visual experiments aim to open up a vision of a past that haunts and informs a present reality where analogue and digital, physical and psychological, combine in acts of repair and reimagining.
‘Lost Landscapes’ aims to reveal two different kinds of perception. It is a real soundscape, with natural bird calls and old-fashioned clocks provoking psychological nostalgia. It is also a digital landscape illustration using virtual nature to allude to a sense of distance and loss. The collision of the two is a form of meditative, re-experiencing of time.
With great social uncertainty and prolonged lockdown, social media saw an unprecedented amount of nostalgia as people reminisced about the 'good old days' before the ‘new normal.’ A plethora of old photographs and digital memories became a mass of virtual fragments of the past, and remembered natural landscapes became a spiritual, pixelated bridge back to a home that perhaps never existed.
Phone images are spontaneous, subconscious, discarded ephemera. We take photos of things we like, things we value, and collect. We keep them for reference, for memory, for later. But as time passes, these photos are abandoned and forgotten by us.
Therefore, I break up the phone photo form into pieces, disrupting and reorganizing them to form an image that resembles a computer code. This image is an allusion to a contemporary mode of recording time. With smartphones, social media, permanent storage of information, and easy access to the past for modern people, metadata becomes a memory and a path to our nostalgia.
