Sun Yuan (born 1972) and Peng Yu (born 1974) are Chinese conceptual artists [1] whose work has a reputation for being confrontational and provocative. [2] They have lived and worked collaboratively in Beijing since the late 1990s. [3]
In 2001, they won the Contemporary Chinese Art Award. [4] They create pieces that dive deep into human nature, psychological, and political experiences.
Sun was born in Beijing and Peng in Heilongjiang. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are famous for working with unconventional media such as taxidermy, human fat, and machinery.
In the controversial [5] Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other , eight dogs (four pairs facing one another) were strapped onto treadmills in a public installation. [6] It used living dogs for performance as part of the art. It was purposely provocative, and organizations such as PETA criticized the piece. [7] This was part of the exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World”. [8] The Guggenheim later released a statement, explaining the artist’s intentions. This piece was eventually removed from the Guggenheim’s digital archive. [9]
For the 2005 Venice Biennale, the duo invited Chinese farmer Du Wenda to present his homemade UFO at the Chinese Pavilion. [1]
The installation Old People's Home, (2008) 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. [10] [11]
"Angel" (2008) is a fibreglass angel sculpture complete with flesh-covered wings, white hair, and frighteningly realistic skin that features details like wrinkles, sunspots, and peach fuzz. [12]
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. [13]
Sun and Peng's 2016 work, Can’t Help Myself , was commissioned for the Guggenheim Museum. It was displayed as part of the Tales of Our Time exhibition at the Guggenheim in Manhattan. [14] The work consists of a large KUKA industrial robot with a robotic arm and visual sensors behind clear acrylic walls. [15] 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." The robot is also programmed with thirty-two "dance moves" and reacts to people around it. [16] [17] These "dance moves" became more depressed and erratic as time went on, and eventually stopped operating in 2019. [18] Can't Help Myself was also displayed in the 2019 Venice Biennale's main exhibition, "May You Live in Interesting Times." [19]
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Zhang Dali is an artist based in Beijing.
Performance art in China has grown since the 1970s as a response to the very traditional nature of Chinese state-run art schools. It has become more popular in spite of the fact that it is currently outlawed. In 1999, the importance of contemporary Chinese art was recognized by the inclusion of 19 contemporary Chinese artists in the Venice Biennale. In recent years, many of these artists have made performances specifically for photography or film.
Sarah Sze is an American artist and professor of visual arts at Columbia University. She has exhibited internationally and her works are in the collections of several major museums. Sze's work explores the role of technology and information in contemporary life utilizing everyday materials. Drawing from Modernist traditions, Sze's work often represents objects caught in suspension.
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Jean "Johnny" Pigozzi, heir to the CEO of the automobile brand Simca, is an art collector, photographer and fashion designer. He lives in Geneva.
Chambers Fine Art is an art gallery based in New York City and Beijing that specializes in Chinese contemporary art. Opened in New York in 2000 by Christophe Mao. Notable Chinese artists who had their first solo show in the United States at Chambers include: Lu Shengzhong, Shi Jinsong, Hong Hao, Qiu Zhijie, Hong Lei, and Chi Peng.
Yang Fudong is a Chinese contemporary artist. In the early 1990s, he began to work with film. He began creating films and videos using 35 mm film. Currently Yang directs films, creates photographs, and creates video installations.
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Simone Leigh is an American artist from Chicago who works in New York City in the United States. She works in various media including sculpture, installations, video, performance, and social practice. Leigh has described her work as auto-ethnographic, and her interests include African art and vernacular objects, performance, and feminism. Her work is concerned with the marginalization of women of color and reframes their experience as central to society. Leigh has often said that her work is focused on “Black female subjectivity,” with an interest in complex interplays between various strands of history. She was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023.
Yuan Gong, is a Chinese contemporary artist. He has obtained a PhD degree in theory of art at the Chinese National Academy of Arts in 2012, but has immersed himself in different aspects of Chinese contemporary art since the 1990s. Being both creator and researcher, designer and planner, Yuan is a multiple facets artist playing at the interface of conceptual art, performance and fine arts. Using a large variety of media, his artworks address many philosophical questions, reflecting his concerns about the Chinese society and impugning the art system, the exhibition format and the status of the artwork.
Li Hongbo is a Chinese artist born in Jilin in 1974. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Jilin Normal University in 1996, Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Folk Art in 2001, MFA degree in Experimental Art in 2010, both from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Li Hongbo is best known for his lifelike paper sculptures, made entirely out of paper and glue. His work has been exhibited in museums around the world.
Cao Fei is a Chinese multimedia artist born in Guangzhou. Her work, which includes video, performance, and digital media, examines the daily life of Chinese citizens born after the Cultural Revolution. Her work explores China's widespread internet culture as well as the borders between dreams and reality. Cao has captured the rapid social and cultural transformation of contemporary China, highlighting the impact of foreign influences from the United States and Japan.
Kan Xuan is a Chinese contemporary visual artist, known for her experimental video artworks, though some of her work incorporates painting, photography, and performance art. She is considered as one of the most important female video artists of China, and has been active since the late 1990s.
Osage Gallery is a contemporary art gallery located in Hong Kong.
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World is an exhibition that took place at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York between October 6, 2017 – January 7, 2018. The exhibition presents works by seventy-one artists and artist collectives across China and worldwide, who define contemporary experience in and of China. Looking at a period between the Tiananmen Square Protests, which also coincides with the end of the Cold War, and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the exhibition explores a time when "anything seemed possible" and artists from China sought visibility in the global art world. The curators of the exhibition write that the works in this exhibition respond to how China went through a radical transformation between 1989 and 2008, which had an unmatchable impact at the global level. The exhibition has been considered as "an invaluable window" onto the intersection of contemporary art, politics, and history, and as an opportunity to ask questions about the role of museums as sites of learning how one could be a global citizen today. It also traveled to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Duan Jianyu is a prominent contemporary visual artist from China and writer. The artist is primarily known for her surrealist-style of paintings that draw from a range of art histories, including European-American modernism, Chinese ink painting, and Chinese Socialist Realism.
Can't Help Myself is a kinetic sculpture created by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in 2016. The sculpture consists of a robotic arm that can move and dance, but has the primary purpose of sweeping up any of the red, cellulose ether fluid that escapes from its inner core. Can't Help Myself was commissioned by the Guggenheim museum and was created with the intent of cultivating several dialogues about the advancement of technology and industrialization, violent border control, and allusions to the nature of life.
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