Zifan Sun was never formally taught how to make the images in the Held in Blur (2025) series. Instead, they arose from intuition and experimentation, as she turned an acrylic sheet into a handmade diffuser and filter. “I observed how light and botanical forms softened, merged, and dissolved,” Sun recalls. The resulting compositions – depicting fuzzy blooms, out-of-focus leaves and watery distortions – are a celebration of imperfection and what can happen when we trust the process. Readers might be reminded of Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, whose similarly dreamlike, light-drenched images find beauty in brief moments of everyday life, or even German visual artist Gerhard Richter, for whom blurring is a trademark.
Sun is a London-based visual artist who studied architecture in Glasgow, and has lived experience moving between China and the UK. She brings that background to Afterglow (2024), which uses distortion to represent her “fragmented relationship with home, shaped by years of living abroad.” It’s a black-and-white collection of overexposed, high-contrast cityscapes. The subjects – buildings, people, rivers – are partially obscured by visual slippages and glitches. “Light washes over surfaces, dissolves edges, and leaves only traces behind, just like memory itself. Figures appear close yet unreachable, much like my connection to home, within sight but always out of reach.” It’s a powerful meditation on migration and transition.
A similar sensibility runs through Persephone (2021), one of Sun’s works on canvas. Painting is central to Sun’s oeuvre, and this abstract piece reflects on the first turn of spring after the pandemic – “tentative, luminous, and slightly unreal.” Here, Sun reinterprets the Chinese heritage technique of piaoqi (floating lacquer) through water and acrylic. The surface – textured, multilayered, gently Pollock-esque – is built up through splattering, pouring and drips, “allowing pigment to bloom, float, and settle in unpredictable tides.” Visually, it gives a strikingly similar effect to that of the filter in Held in Blur. On a conceptual level, the pigment behaves like memory – dispersing and reforming beyond the artist’s control.
Sun also produces delicate figurative work, such as Umbilical and Flower (2023), A Model of Virtue (2025) and The Measure (2023). These images are equally ethereal and unstable, using oils to render portraits that shift in and out of focus. They explore different aspects of womanhood: the weight of societal expectation, the pursuit of self-worth and structures shaping understandings of femininity over generations. A Model of Virtue is particularly compelling. Here, a seated figure becomes a “ghost of history,” representing Chinese women under feudal ethics – restricted by obedience and virtue. “I aim to disrupt the passive ‘being-gazed-upon’ state inherent in classical portraiture, allowing her direct gaze toward the viewer to become an act of defiance – a reclamation of her own agency,” Sun says. Umbilical and Flower brings this sentiment into the present-day, depicting a subject who stares right at us, whilst struggling under familial pressure.
Across photography, painting and mixed-media, Sun repeatedly returns to states of partial visibility. Her message: what we see is shaped by the norms, power dynamics, histories and expectations of the society we live in. It’s an approach that has been recognised through multiple public platforms, including presentations at London Design Festival and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour’s 145th Open Annual Exhibition. Her images hover between appearance and disappearance, depicting abstracted flowers, glitching architecture and ethereal figures that seem to resist settling down. In Sun’s work, blurring does not equal a loss of clarity. Instead, it provides a generative space for experimentation and revelation – offering a shifting canvas on which to reimagine how we understand our place in the world.
Words: Eleanor Sutherland
Image Credits:
1. Zifan Sun, from Held in Blur, (2025).
2. Zifan Sun, from Afterglow, (2024).
3. Zifan Sun, from Afterglow, (2024).
4. Zifan Sun, from Held in Blur, (2025).
5. Zifan Sun, from Held in Blur, (2025).
6. Zifan Sun, from Afterglow, (2024).
7. Zifan Sun, from Afterglow, (2024).
