Sun Yuan (born 1972) and Peng Yu (born 1974) are Chinese conceptual artists whose work has a reputation for being confrontational and provocative. They have lived and worked collaboratively in Beijing since the late 1990s. In 2001, they won the Contemporary Chinese Art Award. They create pieces that dive deep into human nature, psychological, and political experiences.

Early life and education

Sun Yuan was born in Beijing, China in 1972 and Peng Yu was born in Heilongjiang, China in 1974. The two met each other while attending at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where they both studied oil painting.

Career

After completing their studies in the 1990s, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu had short solo careers that set an artistic foundation for their partnership in the early 2000s. The two began making "non-normative and unconventional art" in the 2000s.

Personal life

They were married in 2000.

Work

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu have created Kinetic art and Installation art pieces that work to incorporate unconventional and organic materials into artworks and create "statement" pieces about the current systems of political and social authority. They have utilized technology and multi media art to "comment critically on the modern understanding and exercise of political constructs like the nation-state, sovereign territory, freedom, and democracy." Sun Yuan and Peng Yu work with unconventional media such as taxidermy, human fat, and machinery. For the 2005 Venice Biennale, the duo invited Chinese farmer Du Wenda to present his homemade UFO at the Chinese Pavilion. The 2008 installation Old People's Home, comprised 13 hyperrealistic sculptures of elderly world leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Leonid Brezhnev, in electric wheelchairs set to automatically wander through the room and bump into one another. "Angel" (2008) was a fibreglass angel sculpture complete with flesh-covered wings, white hair, and frighteningly realistic skin that featured details like wrinkles, sunspots, and peach fuzz. Their 2009 solo exhibition, Freedom, at Tang Contemporary in Beijing, featured a large firehose hooked to a chain that erupted water spray at a distance of 120 meters and thrashed throughout an enormous metal cage. Their 2016 work, Can’t Help Myself was commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum and displayed as part of their Tales of Our Time exhibition. The work consisted of a large KUKA industrial robot with a robotic arm and visual sensors behind clear acrylic walls. The robot was programmed to endlessly attempt to sweep red, viscous, blood-like liquid into a circle around its base, in the process spreading and splattering the "blood." It was also programmed with thirty-two "dance moves" and reacted to people around it. These "dance moves" became more "depressed" and erratic as time went on, and eventually stopped operating in 2019. Can't Help Myself was also displayed in the 2019 Venice Biennale's main exhibition, "May You Live in Interesting Times." In the controversial Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, eight dogs (four pairs facing one another) were strapped onto treadmills in a public installation. It used living dogs for performance as part of the art. It was purposely provocative, and organizations such as PETA criticized the piece. This was part of the exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World”. The Guggenheim later released a statement, explaining the artist’s intentions. This piece was eventually removed from the Guggenheim’s digital archive.

Selected exhibitions

1997 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2009 2016