CURA.

Romantic Room marks Chinese artist Sun Yitian’s (b.1991, Zhejiang) third project with Berlin-based gallery Ester Schipper, following her 2023 exhibition in Paris and her presentation at Niche Berlin the same year.

Yitian stages tension, inviting viewers to engage with the overlaps that bridge different cultures. Born in China, now based in Beijing, her paintings become cultural split screens of what has always fascinated her: the long-lasting tension in the relationship between Chinese visual culture and Western iconography, laden with potential and pitfalls. Through hyperreal paintings, often based on her own photographs, Yitian targets this cross-cultural exchange which also doubles as a reflection of our exhausted climate.

In this exhibition, Yitian continues her ongoing exploration of image ontology, concerned not only with what image is today but also what it might become within the context of contemporary painting. The paintings are anchored in religious references, particularly in iconography and motifs throughout art history. Oversaturated landscapes and accentuated shapes expand on the show’s leitmotif: viewers are introduced to a space filled with distortion – artworks hung at different heights while each wall of the room shifts in colour.

The titular painting, Romantic Room, depicts a sleeping princess in a forest with a crouching demon watching over her, unclear whether he is a protector or a predator. Yitian’s fairytale-like composition echoes Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacres et Simulation (1981), dissecting the connection between real and artificial. Just like he frequently used the metaphor of Disneyland – a fabricated space that masks the artificiality of our real world – Yitian asks whether fantasy reveals or conceals the truth, arguing that we might be moving without direction.

On a dark blue wall, Image of Jesus, a small acrylic painting that shows Christ leaning on a shelf, one of Yitian’s many subtle nods to South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s Shanzai: Deconstruction in Chinese (2011). Han explores the term with the same name, originally used to describe the knock-off replicas of electronics in China. Here, Yitian engages with a similar idea – imitation and “fakes” through the Eastern lens become deliberate mutations, “Chinese-style deconstructions.” Similarly, a slingback heel shaped like a fish, stamped with Jingpin, a common term found on counterfeits, plays with conventional notions of authenticity.

Virgin Mary in the Mirror (2024) sees a hooded figure holding an iPhone, maybe a mirror, while observing a Madonna-like statue. Religious references are repeated, but without fixed interpretation. The Madonna may not be a Madonna at all. Yitian is drawn to this intentional ambiguity, offering one unexpected pairing after another.

Romantic Room tackles the increasing difficulty in determining a motif, or purpose, in an era shaped by AI and digital simulation. Who can still tell the real from the artificial? Sun Yitian invites us to confront the narratives that shape and distort our perceptions of reality – almost like a dramatisation of modern life. Acting as a mediator of the unexpected, she weaves overlapping associations, shifting identities and endless reinterpretations into a constant shuffle of the hyperreal. She calls on us to wake up to a truer reality, though she questions whether such a thing exists at all.