Starting from the first day of 2006 until the last day of the year, throughout 365 days Sun Jianchun had repeated the same mundane task every single day: first he selects an image from the tremendous amount of news images available on the internet, then he reproduces the image as a painting.

Compared to the memorable years during which we witnessed many significant events, the year of 2006 seems to be quite bland in general. Sampling from this to create slices of the great era, we can see the meticulous attitude the artist had taken regarding the planning of his project as well as observations of this period of time – he was not controlled by a pre-assigned, empty, macro topic. The requirement to work from the "Degree Zero" approach advocated by Roland Barthes, fundamentally guarantees the objectivity and authenticity of the samples from the very beginning of the project.

In fact he offered 365 details. Without his selection and reproduction, in a short period of time, many of those lively details would go back to darkness and die there like ashes, as if they had never happened before. We can image, as time goes by, this group of Sun Jianchun's work will gradually develop into a proof for history research. Its indefinite meaning is dependent on the future re-interpretation.

Sun Jianchun's 'China, 2006' was the largest and one of the most important pieces on display in the exhibition "55 Days in Valencia: Chinese Art Meeting"at Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), the largest Chinese contemporary art exhibition ever held in Spain. It can be regarded as a meaningful gesture as the work is now brought back to China, where it was originally created, and will be exhibited in the year of 2009, the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of china.