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.