Artist Portrait | Sun Keqing

If you had only seven-seconds of memory like a fish, would it be a blessing, or a curse?

According to a recent study by Microsoft, the average adult human now only has an attention span of eight-seconds, a sharp decrease from 12 seconds in the year 2000. It’s not a stretch to predict that, as technology continuously increases our ability to connect with each other, we will become more and more disinterested as time goes on, swimming and swiping from one shiny trinket to the next in search of “something new.” Within this collective, global stream, Chongqing based artist Sun Keqing fights against the current to ask: “If you had only seven-seconds of memory like a fish, would it be a blessing, or a curse?”

Although this open-ended question seems universal in nature, Sun Keqing’s ongoing, multi-media project “Seven Seconds of Memory,” began as all great art does: from personal, human experience.

“The works in this exhibition begin with my own memories,” Sun Keqing claims, "and records my sorrow and joy, as well as my concern and thinking about the emotional memory between people now.” 

Through a combination of photography, painting, and computer technology such as X-Ray machines, Sun Keqing creates something akin to a memory book of madness, a scrap book collage of torn pages, scribbled notes, aged photographs, and, of course, loads of dead fish. “My studio smelled for weeks!” Sun Keqing recounts.

Artist Sun Keqing's setch

Yet, within the chaos of his work there seems to emerge a sort of clarity that can only occur when viewing one’s past from a present perspective, where life’s many mismatched melodies, motifs, and confusing coincidences can be properly placed within a harmonious, retrospective arrangement; and to Sun Keqing, this context is important. 

As an early adoptee of photography in China and a former student of traditional Chinese painting, Sun Keqing’s work begins on a personal note. "There are works based on old photos at home." Sun Keqing says. "I replaced the characters in them with fish." 

However, Sun Keqing's painstaking devotion to the older, traditional methods of film production also strike a collective chord, one that pays close attention to the intimate relationship that culture shares with the craft of photography. “We know that in previous generations, a curtain was placed behind the group photo shoot.” Sun Keqing claims. “I also created a curtain when shooting fish, mainly to emphasize the feeling of a memory.” 

Similarly, the scratches in the pictures represent the tearing and fragmentation of memory, while the rust and computer glitches reveal the deterioration of our objective recollection over time.

Born the son of a great painter, Sun Keqing always knew he wanted to be an artist, and that great things were expected of him from a young age. However, now in his forties, it certainly took him a long time to get there, and despite his youthful appearance and optimistic demeanor, his past is full of heartbreak and failure. 

In fact, he almost never made it at all. “I was rejected from the high school of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, twice” Sun Keqing says with a laugh, “which made my father very disappointed, maybe he thought I was not so talented.” After graduating from high school, Sun Keqing faced another, nearly crippling setback: he was denied entry to the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts… 4 times. 

Sun Keqing in school

However, Sun Keqing was determined to succeed, and for five long years, he patiently endured rising pressure to give up his dreams as he continuously labored to hone his skills without the support of his family. “Before I passed the exam, my relationship with my father was very tense, and the relationship between my father and my mother was also very tense. They were going to divorce” Sun Keqing says. “My father totally abandoned me, he thought I was never going to be an artist, and that I would also fail in my whole life, too.” 

When asked if he ever became discouraged, Sun Keqing humbly replies, “Never, I’m very patient and good at waiting.” Now, as a professor of photography at his alma mater, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Sun Keqing tries to impart this same attitude on his students. “I always tell my students that it takes a really short time to press the button, but a long time waiting for the right moment to show up. If you look back, for normal people 5 years may seem like a really long time, but I believe that if you really believe in something, especially your art, patience is a very import lessen you have to learn.” 

Exhibition in Chengdu

With his work recently displayed across China, Los Angeles, and exhibitions planned for both Germany and Australia later this year, it seems as if Sun Keqing’s patience has finally paid off, but tragically, too late for his father to witness. “The year I gained entry to university was the year my father found out that he had lymphatic cancer,” Sun Keqing recalls. “Although I thought my paintings were very bad at the time, my father still put it on the wall of his ward, and said proudly, “Look! It is my son’s painting! He is a student of the Sichuan Fine Art Institute now!” The day after his final examination, Sun Keqing’s father passed away. 

This forced forgetfulness of pain long passed becomes a bittersweet companion on each step of our lives, rising from memories like steam over boiling water. Although they may cool over time, allowing us to reconcile joy with sadness, it’s not without its toll. Sun Keqing makes sure to pay particularly close attention to this relationship in his work. “When we want to forget a person, we may tear up his photos. My creation is based on this habitual thinking model of people, which causes viewers to re-select and examine the evasive content in their inner memory, rewriting them.” 

In an era where everything in our lives is recorded, wrapped, commodified, edited, and then dangled like fish food on social media for others to consume, what value do our private memories hold? Do our fragmented recollections of the past, torn from the personal pages of our history and stitched into our subconscious, actually inform who we are? Or is the present construction of us, who we choose to show the world, really all that matters?

When asked if Sun Keqing would prefer to have the attention span of a fish, he responds: “In reality, I am actually willing to become a fish with only seven seconds of memory, because then I can forget some painful things. But the natural condition of human memory has to let us not forget. Therefore, I think I can choose to remember those memories with a temperature, and I think that the temperature of this memory is constantly pushing me to move forward. I feel that at the end of my life, when I think back to all the joy, pain, or sorrow of my life, I can prove that I am a complete person, because I think that memory is an important part what makes us human.”