The Space Between  ·  Studio Visit

Studio Visit: Christina Sun

On painting as a pause, and the quiet weight of what we give back.

Newtown has always had a certain energy — the kind of suburb that attracts artists, young creatives, and anyone who doesn't quite fit anywhere else. King Street was once lined with independent galleries and shops that could only exist because the rent was cheap enough to take a chance on. That's changed. The rising cost of living has quietly pushed a lot of that out.

But on a Sunday afternoon, the street still draws a crowd. People from all walks of life soaking up the last of summer before the cold sets in, sitting outside cafes, wandering slowly, in no particular hurry.

Ten minutes off King Street is Lennox St Studio. The building was once a Catholic boys' school — it's been converted into a shared studio space, home to around 35 visual artists. Walking in, I never quite know what to expect. That's part of it.

I was here to visit Christina Sun, an artist I've had the pleasure of working with, and whose work will be part of the upcoming Monthly Salon.

I've always been drawn to what she makes. There's something Hopper-esque about it at first glance — that same quality of stillness, of a scene caught mid-thought. The ambiguity is what gets you. You stop. You look longer than you planned to.

This was technically my third encounter with Christina. I didn't come with a list of questions or a recorder running. In my experience, that kind of setup changes things — artists feel the pressure to perform, to sound a certain way about their own work. Instead I just let the conversation go where it wanted and wrote down what stayed with me.

Her studio had changed since the last time I was here. She'd recently rearranged the whole space for a video series, a day-in-the-life documentation she'd been invited to be part of. The result was a space that felt considered without being precious. Wherever you pointed a camera, something landed. Light, texture, objects in the right place. The kind of space that looks lived-in and intentional at the same time.

Easel of the painting in process

In the middle of the space, an easel held a work in progress. Leaning against it, a small sketch study and a framed photograph used as reference. Even unfinished, it was immediately clear this piece was different from the other works in the studio — looser, more gestural. All curves where her other work is precise.

When I asked about it, she told me it was a gift for her mother.

She's leaving for London in July to begin her MFA in painting at the Royal College of Art. The photograph on the easel is of her mother, taken when she was roughly the same age Christina is now — twenty-six. Her mother is sitting in a garden, wearing a dress, in the sun. The photograph was taken in China, before she immigrated to Australia.

Christina is painting it for her before she goes.

She's taking a moment that belonged entirely to her mother's life — a particular lightness, a particular youth — and reinterpreting it in her own hand. Giving it back.

When I asked about the shift in style, why it felt like she was moving in the opposite direction, she told me this was actually her earlier way of working. The more structured pieces around the studio came later. So what looked like a departure was really a return.

I pushed a little further, asking if she was switching styles entirely. Her answer surprised me. She doesn't see it as a choice between the two — she needs them to coexist. Like a pendulum, she said.

For Christina, the two styles are almost opposites in temperament. One is loose and impressionistic, gestural, feeling-led. The other is precise and architectural, a direct line back to her former training as an architect. Neither cancels the other out. They need each other. I imagine staying fixed in just one would feel like holding your breath.

At some point the conversation turned to intention — what art is actually for, and what an artist owes the people who encounter their work.

She referenced Camus' Create Dangerously — the idea that making art is never a neutral act. That the artist exists within the world, not above it, and that the work carries weight whether they intend it to or not. For Christina, that responsibility isn't about making work that explains or instructs. It's quieter than that. She wants the work to evoke feeling. To offer a kind of escape — not from reality, but into something more open. Something childlike in the best sense of the word. A space where the viewer isn't told what to think.

What she's resisting, she said, is echo. The work isn't meant to reflect the noise back. Not the anxiety, not the dread, not the pace of everything. The painting is a pause. A place to breathe.

Christina's Studio

Somewhere between the studio and King Street, I found myself thinking about Luigi Ghirri — the Italian photographer whose work carries that same quality of stillness. Ghirri saw himself as a surveyor of the timeless. He wasn't interested in capturing events. He was interested in what a place holds when nothing is happening. The light in a room. A garden in the afternoon. The feeling of a moment that isn't going anywhere.

Christina's process has that same quality. She works from photographs — her own, or archival images — painting not the whole scene but a fragment of it. Something half-remembered. The canvas becomes less a reproduction than a quiet insistence that this moment mattered. That it deserves to be looked at slowly.

I don't think Christina would give you a clean answer to why any of this matters. But I think the painting on her easel is one. A photograph of a woman, twenty-six years old, sitting in a garden in China before everything changed. Reinterpreted by her daughter, at the same age, before everything changes again. No grand statement. No instruction. Just a quiet insistence that this moment — this person, this light, this particular afternoon — deserved to be seen.

Maybe that's what Camus meant. Not that the artist saves anyone. But that the act of making, of looking carefully and honestly at the world, is itself a form of resistance. A refusal to let the noise be the only thing.