Charlotte Street award show draws on artist’s Asian heritage

LAWRENCE – In the current exhibition of Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award winners at the University of Kansas’ Spencer Museum of Art, Merry Sun has constructed three monumental sculptures made of interlocking concrete pieces that weigh hundreds of pounds each and three fish-shaped windsocks made of paper-thin Tyvek fabric that hang on a wall, twisting in the slightest breeze.

Sun is a third-year lecturer in KU’s Department of Visual Art and the new director of its Off-Site Art Space.

Sun said she is drawn toward industrial materials in her work. 

“I like the idea of a working object where labor and service are built into its intrinsic nature,” she said. “That is something I feel a kinship to.”

Sun’s concrete sculptures are a reference to the ancient Chinese dougong bracketing system used to support the roofs and eaves of temples and other large structures. They’re titled “In the Tempest, Through the Eaves?”

“I've reimagined them in concrete here,” Sun said. “Traditionally, dougong are timber-framed architectural structures. Here, the material shift acts as a metaphor for myself and my immigrant identity. When you sever something from its place of origin and transplant it somewhere else, I imagine that maybe some material change would occur, like petrification or calcification.”

Terra cotta roofing tiles are strung from the center sculpture toward the tops of the museum’s columns.

“I formed each tile on parts of my body when the clay was still wet, like plate armor,” Sun said. 

When viewers walk around the piece, vibrational sounds are triggered and cascade down the ceramic tiles.

The original dougong bracketing system was engineered to endure strong earthquakes along China’s many fault lines.

“I took earthquake data from near the places I’ve lived in my 28 years and translated the seismographs into soundwaves,” Sun said.

Sun was born in China and emigrated to the United States as a child, growing up in North Carolina before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art.

The fish sculptures also stem from Sun’s heritage.

“Each fish is dedicated to one of my deceased family members,” Sun said. “I took traits from that person as I was designing their respective fish.”

“This first one is my maternal grandfather, who was a scholar and the chief of surgery at his hospital. The white-on-white stitching on his fish references his white doctor's coat.

“The middle fish is for my paternal grandmother, who was a seamstress and a devout Buddhist. And the last fish is my uncle. He was a gentle, charismatic soul, and so he has this really big, vibrant fish.”

Additionally, Sun said, the windsocks reference the Chinese Dragon Gate myth.

“It is a story about carp that are strong enough to swim upstream in the Yellow River and to jump over a waterfall and through a Dragon Gate. The carp are thereby transformed into dragons,” she said. “So I'm eulogizing my family members as powerful water dragons in their afterlives.”

Sun said she is proud and grateful to have been chosen for the Charlotte Street Visual Artists award, with its $10,000 grant. Noelle Choy and Hùng Lê are the other award recipients this cycle.

“It allowed me to make this body of work — the largest sculptural installation that I've built to date,” Sun said. “This is also the first time that three people of Asian descent have won the Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards in the same year. So I'm also really proud to be a part of that and to be able to exhibit alongside my friends and fellow artists.

“We decided to combine our work into one big show this year. The exhibition is about our individual personal histories, but it also brings our stories together through broader, overarching themes.”

“My Mother's Tongue Ties Me Together” is on view until Jan. 4, 2026.