Sun Xun grew up in Fuxin, a coal-mining town in China’s northeastern Liaoning province, in the years right after the Cultural Revolution ended. The open-pit mine that had once been the town’s pride was already running dry by the time he was old enough to notice it, leaving behind the kind of landscape that looks less like an ending than an excavation still in progress. It is not a bad description of what Sun Xun has spent the last twenty years doing to history itself: digging into it, one layer at a time, with a woodcut knife instead of a pickaxe.
This week, ShanghART Beijing opens Magic Atlas, a solo exhibition built around the feature-length woodcut animation Sun Xun’s studio has been producing for a decade. The film had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2026, and it is, by any measure, an unusual thing to have spent ten years on: a hand-carved, frame-by-frame animated epic set in a fictional coal empire called Luocha, where flight is outlawed and history itself has been erased.
From printmaking student to animation studio founder
Sun Xun studied printmaking at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, graduating in 2005. He wanted to make films while he was there, but couldn’t afford a camera, so he did the only thing available to him: he drew them, frame by frame, by hand. The following year he founded π (Pi) Animation Studio, initially in Hangzhou, later moving the operation to Beijing in 2009. His first major work, Shock of Time (2006), used old Communist newspapers from the 1950s and 60s as the physical surface for its drawings, a decision that set the tone for almost everything that followed: history, in Sun Xun’s work, is never a neutral backdrop. It is the material itself.
The technique he is best known for, and the one at the center of Magic Atlas, is woodcut animation: thousands of individually carved and inked woodblock prints, photographed frame by frame to produce moving images. It is, by design, one of the slowest possible ways to make a film in 2026. Sun Xun has been explicit that this is the point. Working against the grain of an accelerationist media culture, where AI tools can generate a minute of video in seconds, he chose a medium that forces every second of screen time to be paid for in hours of manual labor. A quiet act of resistance carved, literally, one block at a time.
Western viewers looking for a reference point might think of William Kentridge, whose charcoal-drawn, hand-erased animations similarly treat the physical trace of labor as part of the work’s meaning, or of the German Expressionist woodcut tradition that runs from Käthe Kollwitz through to the political print culture of the early twentieth century. Sun Xun has acknowledged Kentridge’s gestural drawing and Marlene Dumas’s psychological weight as reference points, but the more direct lineage runs through China’s own New Woodcut Movement, launched by Lu Xun in the 1930s to make politically urgent art cheap enough to print and distribute widely. Sun Xun inherits that movement’s tools without its propaganda function, turning the woodcut instead toward private, invented mythologies.
Building Luocha: ten years, seven territories, one atlas
Magic Atlas is Sun Xun’s largest project to date, and its scale is difficult to summarize without sounding like a plot synopsis for a novel that doesn’t exist. The story follows a young apprentice named Xiaozhi, who moves through a magical star atlas that guides him across seven fictional territories, including Luocha, a coal empire with no history and no memory, where its magician-inhabitants are forbidden to fly. Each territory has been assigned its own visual language: woodcut, ink wash, contemporary painting, Persian miniature. The effect, according to critics who caught its Locarno premiere, is less a conventional narrative than a collision of spiritual odyssey, political parable and art-historical survey, held together by the recurring figure of a top-hatted magician who has appeared throughout Sun Xun’s work since 2006.
That magician is worth pausing on. He first surfaced in Shock of Time, watching over the images as they unfold, and he has returned in various guises ever since, including in Mythological Time (2016), a five-thousand-frame animation commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that opens with the landscapes of Sun Xun’s own hometown, Fuxin. The magician functions as a kind of stand-in for the artist himself: a figure who watches history unfold from just outside it, aware that the official version being performed on stage is rarely the same as what happened behind the curtain. “Most people look at history like a performance on a stage,” Sun Xun has said. “They don’t look behind the curtains to see what is really happening.”
This skepticism toward official narrative runs directly through the coal-empire setting of Luocha, and it isn’t hard to trace it back to Fuxin. The lingering effects of the Cultural Revolution, and the particular way a mining town’s fortunes rise and fall depending on decisions made far away, shaped Sun Xun’s interest in how history gets remembered by ordinary people versus how it gets recorded by institutions. It’s a theme that recurs across two decades of work without ever repeating itself in the same form twice.
A career built on refusing to repeat itself
Since founding π Animation Studio, Sun Xun has moved fluidly between two-dimensional drawing, three-dimensional installation and time-based film, a range that has made him one of the most consistently exhibited Chinese artists of his generation internationally. His work sits in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim, M+ in Hong Kong, the Brooklyn Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, among others, and he has held solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai and the Hayward Gallery in London. In 2010 he won both the CCAA Best Young Artist award and the Taiwan Contemporary Art Link Young Art Award, early recognition for an artist who was, at the time, barely five years out of art school.
What’s notable, looking across that trajectory, is how little Sun Xun has settled into a signature style in the commercial sense. Where many artists find a visual formula and refine it, Sun Xun has instead kept adding techniques to his repertoire: ink painting, charcoal drawing, stop-motion, 3D animation, VR. Magic Atlas itself premieres a newly commissioned VR piece, Pinnacle of Illusion, alongside the feature film and its accompanying woodcuts. It’s a restlessness that has less to do with novelty for its own sake than with Sun Xun’s underlying interest in how different image-making traditions carry different relationships to memory and truth, an interest a viewer can trace directly back to those first hand-drawn frames on recycled 1950s newsprint.
Readers who found something in Duan Jianyu will find a related sensibility here, though Sun Xun works in a register that’s more mythic than absurdist. And anyone who has followed how Chinese ink traditions get reinterpreted for contemporary purposes may want to look back at our article about Ink Wash Painting, since one full territory of the Luocha atlas is rendered entirely in that mode.
Current Exhibition
Sun Xun: Magic Atlas
ShanghART Beijing, 798 Art District
4 September – 4 November 2026
The exhibition follows Magic Atlas‘s earlier presentation at Times Museum, Guangzhou, in 2025, and its world premiere as a completed feature film at the 79th Locarno Film Festival in August 2026, where it screened in the festival’s main competition. Beijing marks the first time the full body of work, film, woodcuts, animation drafts and the new VR piece, is shown together in the city where Sun Xun’s studio is based.
If this is your introduction to Sun Xun’s work, the ShanghART exhibition is a rare chance to see ten years of labor laid out in one room, rather than encountered piecemeal across a dozen museum collections. Follow us for the next installment in this week’s coverage, and look out for our companion social posts on the studio’s woodcut process.
Sun Xun: Frequently Asked Questions
Sun Xun (b. 1980, Fuxin, Liaoning) is a Chinese artist working across woodcut printmaking, ink painting, charcoal drawing and animation. He founded π (Pi) Animation Studio in 2006 and is best known for large-scale, hand-crafted animated films built from thousands of individually drawn or carved frames.
Magic Atlas is a feature-length woodcut animation ten years in the making, following a young apprentice through seven fictional territories, each rendered in a different historical painting or printmaking style. It premiered at the 79th Locarno Film Festival in August 2026.
ShanghART Beijing in the 798 Art District is presenting the exhibition Sun Xun: Magic Atlas from 4 September to 4 November 2026, including the film, related woodcuts, animation drafts and a newly commissioned VR piece.
Sun Xun has spoken about choosing labor-intensive, handmade techniques as a deliberate counterpoint to the speed of AI-generated and digitally produced imagery, treating the physical time invested in each frame as part of the work’s meaning.
Yes. His work is in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, M+ in Hong Kong and the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo, among others.
He won the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) for Best Young Artist and the Taiwan Contemporary Art Link Young Art Award, both in 2010, along with the Asia Art Game Changer Award in 2018.