Ironically, the artists’ aim with the film was to expose the horrors of dog fighting. “The anger of these people, like that of the dogs, just needs an excuse in order to explode,” Sun said, reflecting on the brouhaha. The museum received so many complaints about that artwork and two others that they swiftly pulled all three pieces before large audiences had been able to come in, see the art, and judge for themselves. Once animal-rights activists learned that the work would be shown at the Guggenheim, they were enraged.
In New York, Sun and Peng may be best known for their video Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other (2003), which the Guggenheim Museum planned to show in its 2017–18 exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World.” The film captures two pitbulls on treadmills, running at each other while an audience watches. They’ve been included in biennials in Moscow, Sydney, and Liverpool, among other cities. Over the past two decades, the pair has exhibited in Australia, France, the United States, and Qatar. “The object of their radical, often outrageous critique” extends beyond “China’s autocratic politics or the dark consequences of globalization,” cutting across national borders. “Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are the sharpest social critics working in China today,” said Guggenheim senior curator Alexandra Munroe. It didn’t take long for the global art world to catch on to their work. Their partnership is artistic and personal: They’re married. They studied at Beijing’s Central Academy of Art and began working together in 2000. Sun and Peng were both born in China in the early 1970s (the former in Beijing, the latter in Heilongjiang). In regard to Can’t Help Myself, he said, “We see how the robot and the liquid finish by torturing each other.” The duo’s brutal approach has previously caused major uproar, raising questions about censorship and the psychology of an audience. Sun also embraces vicious language when he discusses the work. And while those elements are typically found in nature, he likes to force them into controlled, experimental scenarios within their artworks, to see what happens. “I like action, color, ecology,” he said. Sun describes the pair’s work like science experiments. These formidable artworks simultaneously frightened and attracted visitors, who stood safely beyond the machines’ reach. The second, Dear (2015), features a silicon chair with a rubber hose that periodically lashes at the sides of its see-through enclosure. The first, Can’t Help Myself (2016), resembles a giant mechanized paintbrush that sweeps and splatters blood-red liquid around a transparent box. Their two dynamic installations at the 2019 Venice Biennale were noisy and violent, monstrous in scale-and arguably the most spectacular pieces in the Arsenale and Giardini. Artist duo Sun Yuan & Peng Yu make loud, in-your-face work.
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