Merry Sun


image of Merry Sun's work
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Contact Info

Chalmers Hall
1467 Jayhawk Blvd
Lawrence, KS 66045

Biography

Merry Sun is an artist that dwells between the sonic, visual, and written. She received her MFA in Sound Art from the Visual Arts department at Columbia University in New York City. She received her BFA from Sam Fox School of Art and Design at Washington University in St. Louis, with a degree in sculpture and philosophy. She currently resides in Kansas City, Missouri.

My practice is the construction of compositional infrastructures that address the sense of “unbelonging” which accompanies migration and movement. Having been reared in the crevice between two countries, on the sill of the liminal, in constant, yet stagnant motion, my work regards migration and the vagrancy of self to the self. It addresses memories and their denial, teasing at the distinction between not knowing and forgetting. I’ve traveled east to go west, stood west to come from the east, and returned east as a foreign body once more. How many revolutions is a particular obliged to take before finding the allowance to simply be where they are? It is this continuous oscillation between the absolute and the uncertain that my practice regards, slipping “aboutness” to situate itself in the excluded middle of being and belonging. I construct infrastructural systems, physical and semantic, which delineate permeable spaces that facilitate interaction between individual subjectivities and their surroundings. Wielding the porosity of sound, my work dissolves place into space by blurring the edges of adjacencies. I am still in search of the coincidence where discriminatory borders are dismantled and personal boundaries are protected.