Sun Tianyi (b. 1996, Kaifeng, China) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines the entanglements of technology, language, memory, and embodied experience. Working across sculpture, installation, painting, performance, and software, she constructs digital and physical environments as intimate sites where the body, its limits, and its experiences are located as ongoing encounters: simultaneously perturbed and soothed, never fixed. Through everyday objects and mediated forms, Sun probes how digital interfaces, communication systems, and archival structures function as concurrent networks of power, and what it means for the body to persist within them.
Sun received an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2020), and an MFA from Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York (2022), following a BA in Communications and Interdisciplinary Visual Arts from the University of Washington, Seattle (2017). Her work has been presented widely in the United States and internationally, including solo and two-person exhibitions and projects such as 40 Epochs, presented through the VH AWARD at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, and at Hyundai Visionhall, Yongin (2025); Warmer Layers at Helena Anrather Gallery, New York (2024); Means of Production at Shisanwu, Glendale, NY (2024); All Paradises at s+t with JDJ, New York (2024); FROM_LISTENERS at Segue Reading Series, Artists Space, New York (2023); In Search [indistinct conversations] at Bolsky Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); and Penumbra at Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle (2018).
Selected group exhibitions include Powder at Slip House, New York, and Close to the Clouds: Encountering Digital Diasporas at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2026); The 6th VH AWARD exhibitions at Singapore Art Week, Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Basel, and Hyundai Motorstudio 798 Art Zone, Beijing, alongside gmtc sessions #3, New York, and When one language licks another, Below Grand, New York (2025); Nostalgic Mayfly / 恋旧蜉蝣 at Rockbund, Shanghai; Penser avec Baudrillard at Columbia in Paris; Can Thought Go On Without a Body? at Stilllife, New York; Workloop at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; and Bodiless Body at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn (2024); Drawings by Sculptors at Helena Anrather Gallery, New York, and Text-ure at CICA Museum, South Korea (2023); An Asterism at the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, New York (2022); and ARCHIVE MACHINES at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2020), among others.
Sun's work has been featured in publications including ARTnews, ARTnews JAPAN, Whitehot Magazine, Cultbytes, Office Magazine, The AMP, Arte Fuse, Hyperallergic, Art Spiel, Artron, Gritdaily, and Odalisque Magazine, with recent coverage focusing on her engagement with artificial intelligence, digital subjectivity, and the relationship between material culture and networked forms of perception.
Sun has held residencies at EYEBEAM and NARS Foundation, New York (2024), and at Vermont Studio Center and 99 Canal, New York (2023). In 2025, she was named a finalist for the 6th VH AWARD, Hyundai Artlab, Korea, and received the Backslash Art Award at Cornell Tech, Cornell University. She has also held AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowships (2021, 2022) and has lectured and spoken at institutions including Parsons, the ArtCenter College of Design, Smith College, Pioneer Works, Artists Space, and the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.
Sun Tianyi lives and works in New York.