Of corpse we can

Stacey Duff hears about Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's latest work, where giant hoses replace the dead

When Freedom recently opened at Tang Contemporary in 798, the exhibit quickly became one of the most talked-about exhibitions of the summer.

Given the artists’ reputation, some viewers were surprised that the installation did not include laboratory fetuses, corpses, a half-ton of extracted human fat or wax versions of stodgy world leaders rolling around in wheelchairs – items that have all popped up before in the work of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.

‘When we started out [in the late ’90s],’ says Sun Yuan, ‘lots of people were doing conceptual and performance art. At that time, I didn’t really get “art”. All I really wanted was to see something fresh. I wasn’t really even focusing on trying to find something I liked.’

Sun shocked Beijing audiences with an installation called Honey in 1998. The piece featured a bed of ice that covered the corpse of an old man – a corpse of an infant also lay on top of the ice, beside the man’s face.

Not to be outdone, Peng would soon attract attention by stringing hundreds of kilograms of lobsters, snakes, frogs and eels from gallery ceilings. ‘We met at the middle school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts,’ says Peng.

‘Then we both went on to study oil painting at the Academy.’ Why did they quit painting? ‘At the time we graduated,’ says Sun, ‘there were really so many painters out there. We felt it wasn’t necessary to continue in that vein.’

Their knack for shocking audiences made them a perfect match, and in 2000, the fellow artists officially got hitched. As if to celebrate, their first joint project, entitled ‘Link of the Body’, consisted of a performance piece in which they gave what appeared to be a blood transfusion to two infant corpses.

‘Yes,’ says Peng, leaving no room for doubt, ‘the corpses were real’. In the main space here at Tang, a firefighter’s hose rails about like a phallic monster that can’t quite escape its chains no matter how much venom it blows.

Viewers watch this mechanised tragedy in the safety of a side room, although they still hear the roaring water as it peels paint off the floor in the main room and thrashes against the walls which, thankfully, have been reinforced by steel plates.

Every couple of weeks the hoses are replaced then discarded on the floor – their metaphorical fight for freedom terminated.

‘The hoses,’ says Peng, ‘are corpses’. Bloggers immediately pointed to the political innuendo and ironic sadness of Freedom.

Some viewed the piece, like the Gu Dexin exhibit at Galleria Continua (see reviews), as a reference to events twenty years ago. ‘We are leaving interpretation of the work open,’ says curator Josef Ng, who has been planning the project with the artists for the past year.

Ng adds that he and the artists had discarded three other projects before they settled on the current installation.

‘We had planned to do one project called Nothing, in which we transformed the space into a large, airless vacuum – but that ultimately proved to be too expensive.’

How much does a big fire-hose blowing tons of water cost the gallery?

Ng smiles. ‘It’s cheaper than Nothing.’ If the artists themselves are worried about being misinterpreted, they don’t show it. ‘We don’t really consider the opinions of the audience,’ says Sun.

‘If you’re a doctor’, he adds, suggesting that the opinions of a patient are inconsequential to the cure, ‘you should be totally professional. That’s the same for us. We should ultimately exhibit professionalism in whatever we do.’

Freedom runs until August 3 at Tang Contemporary.