Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are artists living and working collaboratively in Beijing since the late 1990s., London Sun was born in Beijing and Peng in Heilongjiang. Sun and Peng are contemporary conceptual artists whose work has reputation for being confrontational and provocative. In 2001, they won the Contemporary Chinese Art Award.
Life and works
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are famous for working with unconventional media such as taxidermy, human fat, and machinery. In the controversial "Dogs Which Cannot Touch Each Other," four dogs were strapped onto treadmills in a public installation. For the 2005 Venice Biennale, the duo invited Chinese farmer Du Wenda to present his home-made UFO at the Chinese Pavilion. The installation "Old People's Home," comprised 13 hyperrealist 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" is a fiberglass angel sculpture complete with flesh-covered wings, white hair, and frighteningly realistic skin that features details like wrinkles, sunspots, and peach fuzz. Their 2009 solo exhibition, "Freedom", at Tang Contemporary in Beijing, featured a large fire-hose hooked to a chain that erupted water spray at a distance of 120 meters and thrashed throughout an enormous metal cage. Some interpreted this as a memorial to the Tiananmen Square incident on its twentieth anniversary.
Selected exhibitions
2016 Tales of Our Time, Guggenheim Museum, NY 2009 Unveiled: New Art From The Middle East, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK 2006 Liverpool Biennial, Tang Contemporary Art, Liverpool, UK 2005 Higher, F2 Gallery, Beijing, China Venice Biennale Mahjong: Chinese Contemporary Art from Uli Sigg Collection, Art Museum Bern, Switzerland The 51st Venice Biennale, Venice To Each His Own, Zero Art Space, Beijing Ten Thousand Years Post-Contemporary City, Beijing 2004 Ghent Spring, Contemporary Art Financial Award, Ghent, Belgium Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, USA Australia: Asia Traffic, Asia-Australia Arts Centre The Virtue and the Vice: le Moine et le Demon, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France All Under Heaven: Ancient and Contemporary Chinese Art, The Collection of the Guy and Myriam Ullens Foundation, MuHKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium What is Art?, Shanxi Art Museum, Xi’an, China Australia - Asia Traffic, Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Australia Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea 2003 Second Hand Reality: Post Reality, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China Left Wing, Beijing Return to Nature, Shenghua Arts Centre, Nanjing, China 2002 The First Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou Art Museum, Guangzhou, China 2001 Get Out of Control, Berlin, Germany Yokohama 2001 International Triennial of Contemporary Art, Yokohama, Japan Winner: The Contemporary Chinese Art Award of CCAA, Beijing 2000 Indulge in Hurt, Sculpture Research Fellow of Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing 5th Biennale of Lyon, Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France Fuck Off!, Donglang Gallery, Shanghai 1999 Post-Sense Sensibility Alien Bodies & Delusion, Beijing 1997 Counter-Perspectives: The Environment & Us, Beijing Inside, Tongdao Gallery Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing
