April 6, 2012 |
Their past projects have included dunking aged waxworks of the Beatles in the Mersey during the 2006 Liverpool Biennial – the counterfeit fab four were rescued following complaints. They’ve mimicked a police car, fitting a white SUV with emergency lights, and driving it around Beijing in full view of the cops, as seen in their 2010 video I Do Not Sleep Tonight. One of their most famous works, meanwhile, Old People’s Home, which formed a highpoint in Saatchi’s 2008 Chinese art survey, The Revolution Continues, is an installation of life-size silicone geriatric doubles of world leaders, bashing pathetically into one another in electric wheelchairs.
Certainly these artists are dab hands at upending symbols of power. The pair met in Beijing in the late 1990s, where they studied oil painting at art school, and have since spearheaded Chinese art’s transition from traditional mediums to seriously experimental territory: their earlier projects have used dead bodies, human fat and rubbish.
Using the darkest humour, their work gives us a bleak view of the modern world, be it the vulture menacing visitors to uber-collector François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi, where it was installed as the presiding figure of death over the art space’s central hall this year, or the giant chimera of a smoke ring, blown across a gallery, only to be hastily dispersed by a spinning broom in their installation A Moment of Clarity.
Be it smoke rings or silicone dummies, Yuan and Yu’s art plays on notions of the real and the fake, or to put it another way, authentic originals and copies. They get us to think about what actually lies behind the brands and icons that we run our lives by. As the Liverpudlian outrage at those drowned Beatles effigies might suggest, the answer seems to be that it’s our own beliefs that makes these symbols so potent.
by Skye Sherwin
