I have two alter egos: Sun and Son.
Son is Sun’s digital Avator
Recently, Sun and Son have been jointly exploring two central questions:
1.What is the puppet of the future?
What is the puppet of the past?
What is the contemporary puppet ontology ?
2.What are the rules of the rules of games?
What is the controller of controller？
What is the cybernetics of cybernetics?
Sun’s practice centers on the ontology of the contemporary puppet, approaching human medical imaging and folk puppet-making through artistic research in contemporary art, and drawing on endogenous image–imagination theory, Xiang (象) theory, and the production of body–mind knowledge.
In her work, she employs a Matryoshka structural approach to construct giant puppets and ritualistic experiences. Through artistic research on the surface and interior of the human body, and using puppetreat and puppet making as her working method, she examines how the puppet and the puppet-image shape visual and psychological representations of the body, proposing the notion of the “Imagined body.” Using processes of dematerialization, rematerialization, and animation of “childish things,” she develops folk-surreal narratives based on her own unconsciously produced animal fables. Within liminal spaces, she creates giant puppets and gamified ritual experiences, exploring new relationships among animation, puppet figuration, and embodied knowledge.
“I am exploring the interactive possibilities between the immaterial body and the material body that are unique to human being. This is something that future robots, as puppets, will never possess—the true human body.”
Son’s core concern lies in the evolution of ritual in the age of digital images and artificial intelligence consciousness. She asks whether moving images—especially animation grounded in handcrafted and material practices—can function as a new vessel to carry, translate, and intensify contemporary rituals.
These rituals take the form of digital puppetry, utilizing motion capture and AI-generated imagery, and manifest as games without rules as well as animations played by rules.
She believes that ritual is the language of all things; and that images, when treated with reverence, can be transmitted and even resurrected. In an era in which artificial intelligence continuously reshapes our perceptions of reality, identity, and belief, she raises the questions: What forms will new rituals take? And how can we maintain balance within processes of transformation that cross media, species, and ontologies?
For her, the romance of ritual lies in its practice of human transcendence. Ritual is also a power of suspension. In an age of endless cycles, ritual offers a pause—a moment in which illusion is transformed into reality through the performative act of creating monumental puppet-images.
Recently, the collaborative works of Sun and Son have primarily revolved around two narrative frameworks:
The Blind People and the Elephant and The Foolish Fish Fable.
