‘Once, Lotus’, by Mingzhang Sun - at Felstead Art

This exhibition charts the artistic and ontological evolution of Mingzhang Sun, tracing a trajectory from his childhood in central China to his reconstituted identity within London’s urban landscape. Through a series of painted works, Sun constructs a fragmented visual autobiography, employing the lotus not merely as motif but as a polysemous symbol, a mirror reflecting themes of memory, resilience, and subconscious preservation.

Within Chinese cultural and spiritual traditions, the lotus conventionally signifies purity and transcendence, emerging unsullied from murky waters. Sun engages with this iconography both reverently and subversively, infusing it with personal narrative to explore dualities of fragility and strength, displacement and belonging. His lived experiences, including trauma, familial rupture, and cultural migration, are encoded within distorted forms, surreal terrains, and materially complex surfaces.

Formally, the works demonstrate a deliberate expansion of medium and method. Early intimate oil studies on canvasboard give way to later incorporations of raw fabric and thread, materially blurring the boundaries between painting, memory, and embodied experience. These technical choices function as acts of reconstitution, weaving together temporal and emotional fragments.

Once, Lotus thus positions Sun’s practice within a discourse of diasporic identity and aesthetic resilience. The lotus becomes an insurgent metaphor for renewal without erasure, a quiet yet potent testament to enduring and rebeginning.

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