Sun Yitian Looks at Everyday Objects Manufactured by China’s Factories

Artist Sun Yitian’s trajectory over the past decade has been fast and vertical. Her photorealist paintings of mass-produced consumer objects—an inflatable penguin, a Ken doll head, a pair of stiletto heels—sell for up to six figures. She’s unfazed by her market success, saying simply that she leaves those considerations to her galleries.

Beyond the art world, mini-versions of these sleek works have graced the side of Louis Vuitton bags, a crossover usually reserved for the most blue-chip of artists well into their careers, with the China editions of Vogue and Elle naming her a top artist of her generation. But she doesn’t consider the LV collaboration related to her artistic career, noting how different their audiences are.

“I paint very cheap commodities,” Sun told ARTnews. “When they’re printed on bags worth tens of thousands of yuan, it’s a kind of transformation.”

Sun’s latest solo exhibition, opening May 2 at Esther Schipper as part of Gallery Weekend Berlin, is her largest to date and presents a transformation of its own within her practice. Several of her 14 new paintings include religious symbols from Christianity, but with their references to China’s copy culture, shanzhai, and its proliferation in the ’90s, some of her references might easily go over viewers’ heads, especially in Europe.

“If you don’t understand China, you might only read the first layer,” she said.

Her Image of Jesus (2024), for example, does not depict the religious figure as he has been over centuries in Western art. This Christ looks like he’s had facial fillers. Sun saw this rendition of Jesus in villages of her hometown, Wenzhou. Each one had its own church, which in turn was plastered with posters of His image and phrases printed in large red Chinese characters about how God loves everyone. “His image has been copied so many times, he’s lost his shape a little,” she said, “but that didn’t mean that his worshippers weren’t true believers.”

Jingpin (2024), by contrast, takes on Wenzhou’s well-known history for fabricating high-quality copies of popular shoes, like those of French designer André Perugia, in a tongue-in-cheek way. Among his most iconic is a high heel that resembles a fish. To the shoe’s inner sole, Sun has added, in Latinate cursive, Jingpin, which translates literally to “high-quality product” and is commonly printed on copies. The artist has also set this shoe in the clearing of a forest of baobab trees, a nod to the rising importation of Chinese goods to Africa.

The exhibition’s titular piece, Romantic Room (2025), shows a Snow White–like figure, whose head rests on a pillow in a forest; behind her is a shadowy demon figure with a menacing grin. The title, Sun said, “comes from the safe place that one might hide in as a child.” That metaphor extends to her ongoing “Shelter” series, in which she paints different inflatable bouncy castle that she remembers seeing in municipal parks during her childhood. Shelter VII (2025), the only of these included in the exhibition, rises up ominously from a cracked dirt ground, a sunset and illuminated streetlamps seen in the distance.  

Though Sun is now based in Beijing, Wenzhou, a city straddling the Oujiang River that opens up into the East China Sea, looms large in the 33-year-old artist’s practice. She described Wenzhou as a place abundant with hilly terrain, but short on crop-growing land. Its proximity to Taiwan meant that in the event of war, it would be the front line, so the government didn’t allocate funds to it. This resource scarcity likely pushed its inhabitants to make a living through manufacturing. The city has become synonymous with shrewd business dealings and generated a great deal of the outlandish wealth of ’90s boom China through its production of light industry goods, like shoes, lighters, toys. Beginning when she was around five years old, Sun played in the factories where most of her classmates lived.

Wenzhou is also home to diverse religions. She remembers a statue of Guanyin (the female Buddhist figure embodying compassion and mercy) in her home; a statue of Virgin Mary in her uncle’s. She recalled that the textures of both pieces were so similar that they could have been produced on the same assembly line. The boundaries of such distinctions—religious, commercial, luxury, everyday—collapse in a place like Wenzhou.

The objects of Wenzhou’s assembly lines have become the focus of Sun’s paintings. She’s equally fascinated by their production as she is by their movement across international trade routes: a Virgin Mary statue found on a table in Europe might just trace its lineage to a small workshop on the southeast coast of China.

For the past two years, Sun has worked out of a studio an hour’s drive northeast from central Beijing. Her 2023 painting Medusa, first shown at Schipper’s Paris branch the year it was made, still hangs in her studio. The Gorgon’s portrait is characteristic of Sun’s technique, smooth surfaces created through a combination of regular paintbrushes, ink brushes used in traditional Chinese painting, and airbrush. In one corner sits a more than 5-foot-tall Ring Popwith a resin mold of the head of Ken (of Barbie fame) in teal. Ken has featured in several works over the years, including Ken (2025), in which the doll stands before an early Renaissance cityscape from Fra Carnevale’s The Annunciation (ca. 1445/1450).

She once wanted to make a giant Ken Ring Pop out of sugar for an exhibition, but for health reasons, opted for mini versions that visitors could slide onto their fingers as they viewed her paintings. As the audience licked away, his image gradually dissolved. Although her sculptural Kendy “was created based on Ken, he’s also liberated from the self,” she said, referring to Foucault’s rejection of the human being as creation’s central element. 

She added, “At this moment, we are wrapped up in a lot of romantic views and relationships. You could dismantle the sofa in your home, build a small house of cushions, hide inside it, and think this world is yours, but it might not be real.”

Sun has extended her interest in the everyday commercial products of Wenzhou to her doctoral studies, in literature at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. Her dissertation is about the depiction of objects throughout art history, starting from 17th-century Dutch genre paintings. These “Little Masters,” as she called them, would “paint a lot of still lives, closely related to social production.”

Sun finds an interesting resonance between the objects she paints and their recent commodification through the LV collaboration: a cheap three-dimensional object, painted two-dimensionally, became a three-dimensional product once more. “It’s quite magical,” she said, “When art intervenes, the value of these symbols changes dramatically.”

Her previous exhibitions have always been about the depiction of objects, but in this one, she looks closely at their trade and their relationship to human life. “This time,” she said, “I talk about objects in the context of the whole world.”