Sun Yitian's Bright Capsule for Louis Vuitton

Helmed by creative director Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s women’s Pre-Fall 2024 collection explored many different objects of desire. Featuring pleasing pops of blue, green, and pink, many of the pieces are also accented with images of novel inflatable animals. These playful prints are the work of Beijing-based contemporary artist Sun Yitian, whose striking compositions and consumerism-inspired subject matter explore both the beauty and folly of mass-produced objects.

“Back to classical antiquity, people were born and grew up in nature, but today, we wake up surrounded by man-made things,” Sun explains. “The expansion of objects makes their lifespans shorter and shorter, also objects are always in a state of constant upgrading/renewal. This is the excess of goods brought about by the continuous improvement of productivity since the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It’s an inevitable trend, not just in the fashion industry.”

Most of Sun’s work accentuates both the welcoming and alarming aspects of macro materialism. Notable pieces feature dynamically staged bounce houses and decapitated Ken dolls expertly rendered with acrylic paint on canvas. But it was her series of plastic toy animals, which she created at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, that was spotlit in her collaboration with the French fashion house. “​​The works created this time are derived from seven groups of animal paintings in my ‘Artificial Objects’ series,” Sun explains of the collection, which sees Louis Vuitton clothing, fragrances, and accessories accented with her candy-colored birds, dogs, rabbits, and leopards.

Many personal and artistic influences inform Sun’s point of view. The artist grew up in Wenzhou, a manufacturing hub in China’s Zhejiang province. She is also inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyper-reality and seventeenth-century Dutch still life paintings, which have a similar strikingness and painstaking pragmatism to her own work. “Due to the limitations of screen size and display technology, my paintings might appear photorealistic and digital on a phone,” she explains. “However, when viewing the actual artwork, you’ll discover traces of the painting process—the texture, brushstrokes, and layering of colors. I intentionally leave these clues for the audience to explore the journey of creation. I try to portray contemporary imagery through a classical approach, rather than replicating the present using pop techniques.”

And though she admires the “efficiency and creativity” of brands like Louis Vuitton, Sun says she isn’t often able to dress up, and instead opts for pieces that are more studio-friendly. “I spend most of [my time] working in the studio, and every piece of clothing is stained with paint as soon as it enters the studio,” she says. “Probably being comfortable is the most important thing to me. But I also love fashion and paying attention to beautiful objects.”