Time Spy by Sun Xun

In partnership with the Audemars Piguet Art Commission, Times Square Arts presents artist Sun Xun’s Time Spy. One of China’s most prominent young artists, Sun Xun created Time Spy for the second Audemars Piguet Art Commission during Art Basel in Miami Beach in December 2016. A violin with wings flies through a sky filled with spinning moons, while rotating machinery gives way to strange landscapes and pressure valves. These chimerical images come together in Sun Xun’s Time Spy, a 3D animated film created from thousands of individual hand-carved woodcuts. Hundreds of Chinese art students assisted Xun in carving each frame of the film, juxtaposing traditional and analog illustration methods with modern 3D animation across digital screens in a way that turns the antithetical into the elegant. The film employs images of traditional Chinese themes like the five elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth) in a symbolic exploration of the nature of time and how we try to make sense of it.