Aura Sun: Aura Enchanted

SOOFA SUHE is pleased to present a solo exhibition Aura Sun: Aura Enchanted, featuring recent works by emerging artist Aura Sun.

When Aura Sun encountered a fishing hook during her travels, she felt it calling out to her soul -- "I was in a museum in Hungary. The moment I saw the fishing hook and net, I knew I had to go home. They tugged my heart back to the ocean, and now it rests at the center of everything I do."

At the end of 2025, Aura returned to the city of Rizhao in Shandong Province, China, where she started working in near-isolation, minimizing all material and social needs. During this time, she committed herself to her artistic inspirations, seeing them as a lens through which she could gaze inwards and listen to her soul.

Aura has an incredibly sensitive mind that takes in the external world without defense. Social interactions don't come to her naturally, as she finds it impossible to bury her genuine thoughts in conversation. Having poured so much of herself into her artworks, it also becomes difficult for her to explain them to others, risking exposing the fragility, mystery, and resilience that lies beneath. At the same time, she finds art essential because it provides a concrete form for the omnipresent motifs that otherwise become overwhelming, appearing in all corners of her conscious and subconscious life. Beyond Aura's silent exterior, one discovers a zestful confidence in art and all its powers: her premodial spirit is a force sharp, brave, and determined enough to defy all authority.

Titled Aura Enchanted, the exhibition traces Aura's art-making process as she uses enchantment to connect the spiritual and material worlds. Here, enchantment is not a passive state of being bound by magical influence, but rather an active effort to recover the world's mysterious wonder through sound and song. The Latin root of enchant is incantare, meaning "to sing upon". Since antiquity, enchantment has always been imagined as a singing spell that alters objects by infusing them with sound. It thus becomes a means of resistance against the standardized systems of values, which seek to define the variability of modern life in absolute terms. For Aura, art can only come from the meaningless because it creates meaning anew.

As a student, Aura spent much of her spare time with music, acquiring a profound sensitivity to sound through years of practicing the violin. But just as she shies away from the crowd, she always found it difficult to perform a piece in its entirety, her attention drifting away towards delicate details or subtle vibrations: the friction of the horse-hair bow sliding against the string, the tension traveling up her outstretched arm, the faint smell of tree sap as each note releases rosin particles into the surrounding air... During these moments, her mind seems to leave her body to be immersed in pure sensation.

In her works, instruments are not just tools for performance, but instead carry a musicality of their own -- an ability to generate vibration, structure, and rhythm in resonance with the imperceivable. Locating this essential quality in devices, materials, images, and bodies, Aura demonstrates their potential to become instruments too.

We can interpret Aura's works through three forms of enchantment: instruments, weapons, and holy objects, corresponding to the powers of resonance, resistance, and cohesion. Instruments bestow formless objects with rhythm and vibration, anchoring internal sentiments to the realm of the real. Weapons arm talent with force and direction, offering a medium for self-discovery and the establishment of personal boundaries. Holy objects embody vessels with spiritual rituals, nurturing it to grow towards truth and reality. All three are transmutations of the same order, differentially evolved within the physical items they occupy.