According to many Chinese myths, says painter Shan-Shan Sheng, the sun contains a yellow bird that flies up into the sky in the morning and back below the horizon at night. One of Sheng’s favorite folktales about the sun goes like this: One morning, for no apparent reason, ten suns came over the horizon instead of one. Before long, the heat grew so intense that plants wilted and people and animals collapsed to the ground. Then a man named Ho-Yi took up his bow and arrow and shot nine of the suns. Ho-Yi became a national hero, and with work the people were able to repair the sky and restore their land.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A few years ago, Sheng did three paintings based on the story of the ten suns. In Ten Suns Rising, people red-orange with heat are crawling on all fours, and the suns behind them are yellow birds. In Ho-Yi Shooting Nine Suns, birds fall to the ground around the hero as he draws his bow and aims at the sky. In Nu-Wa Repairing the Sky, big blue and green shapes lie between the orange figure of a woman and the dimmer orange background.
Sheng, who is 32, came to the United States in 1982 to learn to paint with oils–the 25 paintings destroyed in the fire represented half of all her work in oil. But a week after the fire–after “so many lawyer meetings,” she says–she picked up her brush and went back to work. Since the fire she has completed three paintings. She has consciously changed her style–it has become more abstract–and her subject matter. And now one of her old paintings, which had been safely tucked away in Boston, has been chosen to adorn the poster for Asian Fest, an Oriental-culture festival taking place Labor Day weekend at Navy Pier.
“Back in ancient time, they went along the Silk Road to the West to exchange goods,” Sheng says. “This time you’re going so that maybe you can exchange something, you know, get something back.”
For now she is waiting, and planning to go back next summer. “Hopefully sooner,” she says. But eventually, she says, she will probably use what is happening in China as subject matter for her paintings. “There will be yet another stage of history to go through,” she says.
