Backslash Artist 2025
Tianyi Sun explores the re-creation of embodied experience and its inevitable failure. Through sculpture, painting, time-based media, poetry, and software, she composes responsive environments where materials perform authenticity while quietly betraying it, examining how memory, time, and knowledge are preserved, fabricated, or rendered incomplete within systems shaped by technology, culture, and value.
Drawing from absence and states of diaspora, Sun traces the digital systems, archival structures, and cultural traditions that form concurrent networks of power: frameworks that not only extract and control but also aestheticize, console, or restore. Material copies and reconstructions merge with digital archives and performances to construct a parameter of questions: What are the boundaries between data, narrative, document, and history? How is value constructed when authenticity is performed? And how does the body endure, oscillating between simulation and sensation, absence and memory, deterioration and repair? Failure, in this context, is not reduced to loss but emerges as a structure to re-enter history from the side: simulated, precarious, yet still longed for.
Artwork in Progress
BADWIZARD is part of an ongoing body of research that traces the tension between lived experience and the archival systems that claim to preserve it. It examines how memory, meaning, and embodied experience are reshaped when the database overtakes narrative as our dominant structure for understanding the world.
Merging civic, public, and personal datasets of complaints, requests, and searches into a shared temporal schema, BADWIZARD restages this data through vignettes shot on digital 4K and 16mm film. By rehearsing, performing, and filming at the actual coordinates embedded in the data, the project reenacts complaints, requests, searches, and queries as gestures through which we now navigate experience, recalling in queries rather than narratives. Data is not objective fact but rhetoric and performance, shaped by bias, institutional logics, and the limits of capture. It reveals how historical distortions recur within digital systems, how disparities become automated under the guise of neutrality, and how those most precariously positioned are often rendered absent within the very systems they sustain. Through this filmic and data-driven restaging, BADWIZARD explores how fragments of lived experience might become a form of collective memory or collective fiction, and what it means to reconstruct meaning inside computational structures that both depend on and overwrite the lives they record.