(photo by Jim Barcus)
The 2025 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award winner merges sound and sculpture into compelling meditations on memory, migration and displacement
Sound always speaks; even empty rooms are sonically charged, and like scent, sound may also time-travel us across distances and memories. Merry Sun’s interactive installations merge sound and sculpture, often touching on memory, migration and displacement. Teaching herself to code while earning her MFA in Sound Art at Columbia University, Sun is a Charlotte Street resident artist and Visual Artist Awardee who is exhibiting her work Aug. 26, 2025, through Jan. 4, 2026, at the University of Kansas’ Spencer Museum of Art along with the other two Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award winners, Noelle Choy and Hùng Lê.
Having arrived in Kansas City a couple of years ago, Sun has, in that time, secured studio space, won this Charlotte Street Award, participated in a summer 2025 group exhibition at Brooklyn, New York’s Smack Mellon, and has opened Kansas City’s 100,000,000 gallery with five other artists. Sound, memory (or its lack), movement and change, which settled in her psyche as a child, inform her work, along with 15 years of classical piano study.
Memories, or what we imagine our absent or forgotten memories to be, shape us as we often search for that missing something; this may be especially true for children of migration or dispossession. Merry Sun — raised in China by her maternal grandparents until she was around three and was able to join her parents in North America — has no real memories of those very early years and feels that absence. Growing up in North Carolina, after an initial time in Canada, she feels a certain kinship to physical and emotional displacement and the sonic experiences that have accompanied (or can be invented, instead) and continue to accompany her movement through and between time and place.
“My practice is the construction of compositional infrastructures that address the sense of ‘unbelonging’ that accompanies migration and movement…” she notes. “It addresses memories and their denial, teasing at the distinction between not knowing and forgetting.”
Sound is porous, and in Sun’s work, sonic feedback produces its own new sound merging with her developed tracks. In “Channels,” works whose structures, sound and meanings may change from exhibition to exhibition, two handmade concrete block sculptures suggest wells whose concave bottoms push pre-programmed sounds to the top of the sculpture, where that sound is commingled with ambient human and environmental sound in the space: conversations, movements and breathing are all absorbed into the soundtrack as the sculptures interact with us and communicate with each other. The sculptural components of this and other works are sometimes borrowed or cannibalized from previous sculptures, building a material and sonic memory into each installation.
Because even sculptures can get lonely, Sun often creates her work in collaborative pairs to address isolation and a lonely childhood. The sculptures sonically communicate with each other, their sounds merging, which becomes the conceptual bridge connecting the works to each other and to us. Our breathing, murmurs and movements determine our metaphysical relationship to the objects, but like sound itself, that relationship remains ephemeral and transitory.
The participatory sound Sun orchestrates helps determine the sculptures’ affect and presence. In “Homage to Pauline Oliveros” — an experimental composer known for folding environmental sound into her work — Sun concrete-cast apple boxes as the primary objects. Viewers may rock the two pieces to distort the sound or generate a pattern in the sonic feedback, creating an unfixed and transitional effect as our participation recalibrates the soundtrack.
In one of her newest pieces for the Spencer exhibition, Sun references the traditional architecture of Northern China and its clay roof tiles. She strings together her handmade overlapping tiles and sonifies their slight ambient movements. She notes that “the tiles have cloud patterns on one side, and the imprints of pressed rice on the other side (reference to sky and earth).” The work is time and sound out of place, a temporal site rooted in a merging of distant past and place and here-and-now-ness.
With wide-ranging interests, Sun writes prose, has crafted a play, and worked with delicate materials including paper, thin wire, fabric and hair. In “Eulogy Nai Nai,” in honor of her seamstress grandmother, Sun embroidered a Buddhist mantra from her own hair onto muslin. Embroidery, historically attached to the feminine, and an archaic signifier of femininity, is an homage to her grandmother’s hard work. Stitching with her own hair, a medium traditionally used in Victorian mourning objects, Sun creates a deeply personal yet historically poignant work.
Merry Sun’s work is a cultural and individualized meditation on navigating dispossession and its losses, where everything is relational, even nostalgic, traveling between time and place, distance and nearness, memory and its absence. While there are losses in the migration experience, Sun has implemented newness and recalibrated the idea of lost memory through the accretion of sound and the material memory implicit within the sculptures.
Our presence and participation charge the works, composing or altering the sonics, becoming part of the works’ memories, no matter how fleeting those may be.
For more information about Merry Sun, visit homedespot.co.
