Unconventional Practice: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's Art

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2011-08-16

Unconventional Practice: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's Art

 

Gu Zhenqing


I. 
Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are Chinese artists, who are a couple, and collaboratively create and show work. They have always focused on the experimentation of contemporary art by probing its theoretical framework and searching and renewing possible modes of expression and approaches. Seemingly, their practice focuses on shocking their audience by using all types of unusual material. They confront the influx of commercial culture within the global context, while maintaining a rare insight on individual freedom within a culture of the spectacles.

In 2011, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's collaborative work Teenager,Teenager was proposed based on spatial specificity of the Arario Gallery in Seoul, Korea. Arario gallery in Seoul is situated in the Samcheong art and culture district next to the Gyeongbok Palace, an area frequented by tourists. Based on the proposal for Teenager,Teenager, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu would transform the gallery space into an informal football field and invite local children to practice such as dribbling, heading, free kicks, etc. A nearby cement wall on the adjacent street from Arario was replaced with a thick, anti-shock hardened glass. This hardened glass acted as the goal, thus the boys aimed every shot at this glass. The visitors on the other side of the glass could potentially be the audience for this art piece. The sound of the footballs banging into the glass wall and the motion of the footballers inside the space disrupt the path and rhythm of those walking outside. They capture the attention of the pedestrians. Within the gallery and the glass, there is a space where visitors can traverse.  As visitors walk through the gallery and up and down stairs, they can mirror the possible paths where the football also travels. The speed and dynamic motions of the ball impose certain connection to the bodies of the audience. Within this space, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu pre-installed a few sculptural figures that served as bystanders and onlookers looking at the boys playing football. The gallery was thus transformed into a cultural and athletic space within an urban community. Every inch of the gallery may become a space that the ball could travel, random, disorderly paths of the kicked ball. The otherness or the alienation of contemporary art space in this piece highlights Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's practices of breaking artistic conventions, modifying according to various contexts of time and space or the greater cultural background. In their conscious and subconscious, art should not have boundaries. Their thoughts are free of restraints. For this site, they offer various circumstances. Boundaries exist in any installation site or within any art circle. Some may be consequences of the transformations from the European logos-centrism and conceptual development of contemporaneity. The discourses of art history, cultural theory and socio-ideological constructs delineate the boundary of art, yet what Sun Yuan and Peng Yu propose is an opportunity to challenge and reflect upon them. On the surface, they incorporate into the art world objects and events that are outside of the artistic boundary in order to expand that existing boundary. In fact, they are challenging and reflecting on people's fossilized structure of recognition and ways of thinking, as well as on their own sensual experience and thoughts process. The truth is Sun Yuan and Peng Yu disregard any artistic boundary. Whether or not this boundary is tangible, it often clashes with the conceptual variations of those who are within the borders. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu enjoy dismantling the existing tricks and do not act according to given conditions. They specifically address a given situation in order to respond to and command every installation site and the public reaction to each of their work. For Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, artistic creation is not necessarily a response to a previously existing artwork, nor is it an attempt to break away from the past. They are not interested in furthering a practice once its initial goal has been achieved, but are more inclined to engage with existing social phenomena that have yet experienced or simply know. Their unconventional artistic practice is characterized by rejecting the usual behavior of establishing new models based on existing cultural ideologies. They aim to fully feel and respond to the unknown world that art presents beyond and within the universe.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's Teenager,Teenager is an extension of the spatial tension rendered in their 2009 work Freedom shown at the Tang Contemporary Art Centre in Beijing. The spastic forceful whipping of water from a loose water hose due to high, irregular pressure was like a uncontrollable force of freedom.  The water spewed within an enclosed iron space with small glass windows of 400 cubic meters with 11 meters high walls. The space, water pressure, and water saving circulation system restricted the unrestrained water. Teenager,Teenager, like Freedom, does not refer to any specific social phenomenon. However, Freedom is more like an art installation where the audience was fully excluded from the spatial structure of the artwork, made to stand outside the enclosed space.  The audience saw the work through the round windows and heard the "pong pong" sounds as the water hit the wall. Teenager,Teenager, on the other hand encompasses both installation and performance aspects, where Sun Yuan and Peng Yu incorporated the Korean boy and the audience into the art space, and the pedestrians could also respond to the work and thus are included in the work. The traces of the boy's football activity, like the remnants of water in Freedom, contain a certain degree of unpredictability, lack of order that is largely determined by activity at the performance site. Although, football is a popular sport in Korea, the boy in Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's work does not express any conspicuous metaphor. The overall artwork, on the other hand, offers a visual metaphor--it objectifies the artist's sensual experience and imagination, but allows for degrees of freedom for the audience's interpretation that gathers and expands the audience's cognitive experience. The audience's on site experience and their afterthoughts are the types of responses the artists seek. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu attempt to represent the human condition and the essence of existence. They have been searching for, negotiating with and commanding unique materials and approaches beyond artistic convention. Then they show their objectified and visualized materials and approaches to explore and study these unknown experiences.


 

II.
Through varying methods of contesting conventions, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s artworks can be tersely insightful or even dominate a group exhibition context by often transcending the modes of other contemporary work, giving an impression of stealing another’s thunder. There previous works have experimented with metaphor and relationality, using visual objects to imply or make comparisons with certain known or unknown experiences. In terms of the exhibition site, they have created full-immersion experiences that engulf the audience, thus effacing the audience existing awareness and daily experience in order to instill the mood and experience of the exhibition site. Unlike the European Fluxus artists’ all encompassing language experiment,since 2000 Sun Yuan and Peng Yu began to pursue a linguistic purity by emphasizing uniformity in concept, form, approach and materials. The questions of their discussion gradually shifted to everyday conventions and their transformations.


In the second half of 2003, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu presented
Dogs that Cannot Touch Each Other, Safe Island and Content for Hegemony, all contain strong visual impact. These three works adopt performance, installation and other genres of expression that shift away from the still or relatively inactive permeation of aesthetics of violence found in their earlier works. Pit bulls, tigers and boxing athletes were the executers of these performances, who were embedded signifiers of fury, danger of dominance, or recessive implications of attack and deterrence. Within natural conventions and existing rules, they are all representatives of fierce and feisty individuals and animals who pose inflexible contradictions with the modes of expression adopted in the European museums. They appear as new materials of artistic expression within the exhibition context. Their performances, at times, display potential entertainment that offer an exciting on-site effect, but the work's overall performance provides a different visual impact. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's critical modification of convention is the actual point of contact that impulsively produces modes of expression. 


The pit bulls particular are trained for dog fighting and
to have ferocious responses to other dogs. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's 2003 Dogs that Cannot Touch Each Other adopts a treadmill for dogs for this work. In the same year, at Today Art Museum, they paired 8 dogs on facing treadmills so that they could charged each other. However, due to the rolling treadmill under their feet, regardless of their effort to surge forward, none of them could run beyond the treadmill belt and attack their target. Suddenly, the scene is filled with the sound of pounding on the treadmills and with the awe, and perhaps anxiety, of the audience. With the treadmills, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu changed the conventions of dog fighting. The physical attacks of the pit bulls were replaced with a fierce and threatening gesture of a "spiritual war". The conflicts seemed volatile, yet unattainable, which contributes to the tension of this piece. The pit bulls' ineffectual attack, face off, and animalistic impulse transcend the insensible rules in reality that allows true violence and conflicts to be embedded.


Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's 2003
Safe Island installed four high iron fences one-meter long along the inner walls of the Nanjing Shenghua art center. These formed a fenced in walkway in the exhibition space. In between this narrow space, an adult tiger was placed. In order to enter and exit the space, the audience had to pass through the space that the tiger walked through two iron doors. Whether they would pass safely depended on the distance of the tiger. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu reversed people's confinement of the tiger. As the rules changed, the tiger could march back and forth, laying down, whereas the audience's freedom of going in and out and the threat to their physical safety depended on the tiger's distance to door.


Sun Yuan and Peng Yu aim
to break rules is apparent in Content for Hegemony from 2003 exhibited at Beijing Left Bank Commune. They tinkered with the rules of free combat fighting by changing the number of combatants from two to three. Free combat is predominantly bare hands fighting based on the traditional Chinese Kungfu sport of resistance. In this piece, the three combatants fought at the same time and the winner was determined based on a point system. These new conditions made the former experience and strategies of combatants ineffectual. In order to avoid mixed fighting, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu stipulated that whence a party fell to the ground, he must exit the competition. Therefore, the remaining two could revert back to their usual method of fighting. Conflicts and antagonisms between nations and individuals are always complex and dynamic. The simple two-party opposition is metaphysical and only exists theoretically within the parameters of a game. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu introduce the jungle rules of social competition to the game and thus presents the real complexity life conflicts. 
 
 

III.
In 2005, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s The Strongest Dragon Crosses the River work was included in a group exhibition at 798 Space in Beijing. They installed a 10 square meter foam rink and smaller pieces of black foam piled to 1.5 meters high. Upon entering the exhibition space, the audience had to walk through this large foam trap in order to see the main exhibition. Once the audience stepped in it was difficult to get out; thus the audience had to adopt various methods to struggle through and climb out of the rink in order to proceed through the exhibit. The audience’s usual viewing experience of leisurely looking at an exhibit was replaced by the unusual physical bodily experience imposed by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. Within this atmosphere, the audience engaged with and became part of the artwork. There was a disruption of the subject-object exhibition relationship. The audience thus actively interacts and is passively viewed as they explore their surrounding. They were forced to abandon their usual viewing experience and aesthetic habits and replace them by exploring, sensing and experiencing the unfamiliar.


In 2006, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu began to present a series of
silicon sculptures. For instance, their special proposal, Tomorrow, for the Liverpool Biennial consisted of four sculpture of elderly caucasians floating on water. The 2007 exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, Old People's Home consisted of 13 wheelchair bound elderly figures dressed with political stature.  And Angel in the Poznan Biennale depicted an old woman with featherless wings as a fallen angel. Due to the material, high-level of production, and the realistic vivacity of the sculptures, it was often shockingly difficult for the audience to distinguish them as sculptures. Because the works Tomorrow, Angel were shown in public spaces in Liverpool, England and Poznan, Poland, respectively, the audience's immediate response became a critical aim of the works. The public, beyond their shocking amazement from the exhibition site, were left with indelible memories. These memories might unnoticeably change their recognition of art, or even their conventional approach to the knowledge of objects.


Sun Yuan and Peng Yu use art to venture into the
peripheries and test the given boundaries delineated by social conventions and existing mores. They have modified certain existing rules in everyday life into forms and methods of structural language. They change various regulations and its relevant effects on the field of contemporary art to allow new forms and approaches to germinate and expand their contemporary art practices. The artists are reflective, who wittily experiment with subjects by manipulating specific situations and altering parameters. Once the rules change, the outcomes of such artistic expression are often unpredictable for both the artists and the audience. However, the target of their challenge is to sense and attempt to manipulate such unknown possibilities. These modifications perhaps will incite changes in people's way of thinking, behavior and aesthetic inclination that lead to further maneuvers. Another possibility is simply changing the ways of representation and viewing methods of art. The artists have always been willing to accept the outcome of their experiment, even their failures. In fact, they have always been devoted to breaking through pedantic artistic context with adventurous attitude, emphasizing the impact of true artistic experiments on the social aesthetic inclination and framework. Thus, their art transcends the ineffective decorative characteristics of everyday art, refining a fierce and acute criticality and cultural reflective spirit.