SUN Yuan & PENG Yu: Teenager Teenager

Arario Gallery is pleased to present recent sculptures with performance and video works by Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, their first in Seoul, Korea.

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 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.

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.

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.

Since Sun Yuan & Peng Yu started to work from 1998, their works have been included in exhibitions worldwide including Lyon Biennial (2000), Yokohama Triennial (2001), Gwangju Biennial (2004), Venice Biennial (2005), Liverpool Biennial (2006), Moscow Biennial (2009), Sydney Biennial (2010). They also had lots of important group exhibitions in Groninger Museum (The Netherlands), Kunsthaus Graz (Austria), Saachi Gallery (UK), The National Museum of Art (Japan), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (China) as well as solo exhibitions in Tang Contemporary Art (China), Galleria Continua (Italy) and so on.

* This press release was edited from the essay ’ Unconventional Practice: Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Art’ written by Curator Gu Zhen Qing((顧振清) in 2011.