Artist Bio
Merry Sun is a sound artist and sculptor in Kansas City, Missouri. Sun was born in Shenyang, China, and immigrated to the States at the age of three. Much of her practice addresses her fractured past and oscillating patterns of migration. Sun constructs compositional infrastructures that utilize feedback to facilitate audience exploration and experimentation. Wielding the porosity of sound, her work searches for the coincidence of space and place, dissolving boundaries between memory and reality.
In 2019, Sun received her BFA from the Sam Fox School of Art and Design at Washington University in St. Louis with a double major in sculpture and philosophy. She received her MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University in New York City in 2023. Sun is a 2025 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Fellow, a current resident artist at Charlotte Street Foundation, a Lecturer at the University of Kansas, and a co-founder of 100,000,000, an experimental art space in Kansas City, MO.
Artist Statement
My practice is the construction of compositional infrastructures that address migration, movement, and the sense of “unbelonging”. 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, both physical and semantic, that delineate permeable spaces, facilitating 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 searching for the coincidence where discriminatory borders are dismantled and personal boundaries are protected.
@mrrps
For inquiries, email mrrps@merrysun.art