Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's large-scale installations tend to generate controversy for using human and animal material to contest political activity and moral boundaries.
Read MoreYuan and Yu's video installation Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other (2003) shown as part of the 2017 group exhibition Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World at the Guggenheim Museum generated much controversy for showing fighting dogs strapped to treadmills trying to attack one another.
The work was pulled from the exhibition, alongside two others, after the New York Times published a preview that caught the attention of animal-rights activists. A petition circulated accusing the museum of animal torture. The video remained in the exhibition, frozen on the video's title card to avoid further criticism.
Old Persons Home (2007), a parody of the U.N., showed 13 life-size sculptures of elderly world leaders on dynamoelectric wheelchairs, senile and toothless, set to randomly roll around the exhibition space at a slow pace, colliding into one another.
Just as horrifying and realistic, Angel (2008), a fibreglass sculpture of an angel with grotesque flesh-covered wings, sees the elderly creature splattered on the ground, with white hair and white tunic, wrinkles and moles visibly apparent.
Civilization Pillar (2001—2019), a tall yellow pillar made from human fat, paraffin wax, and petroleum jelly, serves as representation of human excess, referring to the unused food energy stored in the body, extracted through cosmetic procedures.
Commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, Can't Help Myself (2016) sought to evoke the mechanical relationships between people and state, replicating the conditions of surveillance and warfare around border control.
The installation showed a stainless-steel robot in a white room, wiping away at a pool of blood-red liquid. Viewed from behind clear acrylic walls, it was programmed to contain the liquid to a certain area of the room. Mechanical arms frantically shove the liquid back in place once the machine's sensors detect the liquid has strayed too far, leaving red stains and splatters.
