Jak Sun

Jak Sun is a former street artist who now paints with spray-paint on canvas. Sun took three NGV Collection works as inspiration. Jak Sun’s spray-painted canvases reflect his time as a street artist in Beijing in his youth.

In the work DNA, Sun takes a pair of hand-painted porcelain dancers produced in c. 1770 by Chelsea-Derby manufactory as inspiration. The original sculpture is identifiable by its ‘patch marks’, or dark, unglazed circular spots found on the underside or base of Chelsea-Derby porcelain figures. Sun’s painting, by contrast, leaves no trace of the artist’s hand. Using the quintessential art form of New York in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Sun reinterprets an eighteenth- century display of European scientific, technical and cultural prowess.

The Crown Jewel takes as its subject an eighteenth-century porcelain sculpture of figures associated with the ancient allegorical story Roman Charity. Through this archetypal image of devotion, filial piety and honour, Sun brings a medium associated with youth and street culture into association with the height of European refinement.

Created using a technique originating in Asia, porcelain sculptures became extremely popular with the wealthy European classes in the eighteenth century. Works often drew on myths and allegorical stories as subject matter. Untitled (Scaramouche and Columbine) is inspired by a porcelain sculpture produced by the German manufactory Meissen of two figures from the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition of comic theatre, Scaramouche (‘little skirmisher’) and Columbine (‘little dove’). In Sun’s work, the medium of porcelain is itself subject matter, and he employs the medium of spray-paint to magnify and therefore intensify the original work’s vivid colours and shiny glaze.

The acquisition of this artist’s work is supported by Brendan & Grace O’Brien

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