Roof of the World

“When I fall into silence, everything before my eyes becomes a part of me.” – Sun Ziyao

Roof of the World presents a body of work shaped by the years Sun Ziyao spent living on the Tibetan plateau – a period that shifted his painting from wild intensity to attentive stillness.

In 2020, the artist relocated to Lunang, Tibet, where time moved differently, and daily life unfolded through repetition, labour, and solitude. Immersed in this environment, his practice began to slow down. The unruly energy of earlier works gave way to a quieter visual language, anchored in presence rather than gesture, and memory rather than observation.

His recent paintings reflect this shift. Stillness beneath vast skies, an animal poised in reflection, a landscape that breathes rather than speaks. These images suggest not a depiction of place, but an inward gaze. They hold the feeling of having stayed somewhere long enough to see differently.

Here, the ‘roof of the world’ is not a spectacle of altitude, but a state of sincerity. Elevation is found not in scale, but in attention; not in what is seen, but in how it is held.